KING OF THE CASTLE

Choice and Responsibility

in the Modern World
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2015

https://archive.org/details/kingofcastlechoiOOeato
 KING OF
THE CASTLE
Choice and Responsibility
in the Modern World

Gai Eaton

PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH

THE IMPERIAL IRANIAN ACADEMY
OF PHILOSOPHY

THE BODLEY HEAD

LONDON SYDNEY
TORONTO
 © Gai Eaton 1977
isbn o 370 30062 9
Printed and bound in Great Britain for
The Bodley Head Ltd
9 Bow Street, London WC2E 7AL
by W& J Mackay Limited, Chatham
Set in Monotype Imprint
First published 1977
 CONTEXTS

Introduction, 7

1 Unreal Cities, 23

2 The Cost of Wealth, 43

3 Liberty and Obedience, 62

4 Man in Society, 88

5 Man as Viceroy, 114

6 Knowledge and its Counterfeits, i<

7 The Only Heritage We Have, 165

8 What We Are and W here We Are,

Suggestions for Further Rinding, 21

'Now/ said she, 'I know the cause,

or the chief cause, of your sickness.

You have forgotten

what you are/

BOETHIUS
 INTRODUCTION
If, by some strange device, a man of our century could step back-

wards in time and mix with the people of a distant age he would
have good cause to doubt either their sanity or his own. Mountains,
forests and the blue sky would look familiar enough, but they
would not be seen by the people around him in the way he saw
them. Their physical features might be the same, but their meaning
would be different.
He would know what common sense is and what constitutes
human normality. So would the people- amongst whom he found
himself, but their common sense would differ from his and their
normality might seem to him abnormal. Questioning everything
they took for granted and amazed that they should be so unques-
tioning in their assumptions, he would find that all he took for
granted was brought into question. His 'Why:' would be met with
their 'Why?', and he would not know the answer.
From our present position we can see how limited were the
beliefs and ideas of earlier times and other cultures, how many
avenues were left unexplored and how many opportunities missed.
It is easy to suppose that, in changing our perspective, we have

escaped from the limitations inherent in human thinking and

human vision. Vet our faculties and our senses are the same. We
are not a new species, and to compare our own world view w ith
any other is merely to compare different kinds of limitation, as
though a man tunnelling his way out of prison were to emerge
within the perimeter, exchanging one cell for another.
So it must always be unless the prisoner learns that freedom
lies in quite another direction, never through the tunnel of time.

Like those who came before us we have chosen— or had chosen

—
on our behalf certain particular objectives out of the multitude
of possibilities open to man and, like them, we ignore everything
that seems irrelevant to our purpose. This purpose is determined
by the assumptions we take for granted, the axioms which seem to

7
 INTRODUCTION
us to demand no proof, the moral imperatives which appear self-
evident and therefore unarguable. We are rational creatures, cer-
tainly,but reason does not operate in a vacuum or spin the premises
of argument out of its own substance. It must start from some-

where. Certain propositions must be accepted as self-evident

before our minds will function, and one can reason as well on the
basis of a false proposition as upon that of a true one.
A man in a coil of rope for a snake. From
dark place mistakes a
then on his logic may be impeccable, his behaviour entirely reason-
able but he is still wrong. It is the basic assumptions which deter-
;

mine all the rest.

My intention in this book is to take a long ;
hard look at some
of the basic assumptions of our age, to question the unquestionable
and to cast doubt upon propositions which appear self-evident.
This cannot be done without, at the same time, suggesting the
outlines of quite a different perspective.
No one can extricate himself completely from the conditioning
of his own period and environment. Consciously or unconsciously,
we are all of us to some extent held captive by the clinging vines
of our particular jungle and at home in these bonds. They are,
indeed, like extensions of our selves and correspond to deeply
rooted habits of thought and of feeling. It is not easy to break free,
but, precisely because we are human, it is not impossible. Between
earth and sky, among all living creatures and all the earth's orna-
ments, man alone is capable of some degree of detachment from
his temporal matrix.
But to break free is not to float away into the void. No one
could live and think in a moral and intellectual no-man's-land. To
be able to look critically and objectively at the ground upon which
the people of our time have taken their stand, one must have firm
ground beneath one's own feet. To diagnose the ills of the time one
must possess standards of health.
The point of view from which this book is written is, in the first
place, Islamic. This does not mean that Muslims in general would
necessarily endorse the views expressed or that I propose to put
forward a specifically Islamic critique of Western, post-Christian
civilisation. What it does mean is that this view is rooted in the
Muslim faith and in a soil quite different to that which supports
either the modernistic Christian or the modern atheist.
Secondly, this perspective is founded upon a belief in the essen-

8
 INTRODUCTION
tial unity of the great religions as deriving from a single source of
Revelation, and in a perennial wisdom expressed not only through
the religions but also in the myths and symbols of ancient peoples
(and of what are commonly called 'primitive' human groups up to
the present day), a wisdom which may be said to inhere in the
deepest level of our being so that we need only to be reminded of
it This belief is
in order to rediscover the truth within ourselves.
in fact an extension of the Islamic perspective, for Islam is by
definition the final Revelation in this human cycle and the final
crystallisation of that wisdom.
Lastly and, one might say, as a logical consequence, my concern
is with human 'normality' as it has been understood through the

ages and in a vast diversity of cultures the nature and the status
:

of man man, the two-legged creature standing upright in his

as
blue and green world, face-to-face with his God. Only in terms of
an immutable norm can one even begin to consider what choice
men have in their lives and what responsibility is theirs.
Whether we praise or condemn contemporary civilisation, none
can deny that it is— in terms of what men had been and thought
and done until quite recently -different, peculiar, abnormal.
There are those who think that this abnormality represents our
long-delayed emergence from darkness into the light of reason ;

for others it represents the terminal stayc of a mortal sickness. But

none dispute that we are different and unrecognisable, like crea-

tures from outer space who have descended upon the earth's
carapace and taken it over. Whether we see this strange new figure
of a man as godling or monster, there has been nothing quite like

him before or elsewhere. If we were to substitute for 'abnormality'

the word 'deformity' we might see more clearly what is at issue,
for to be deformed in this sense 'is to be infinitely odious in His
eyes,Whose love of Beauty is the hatred of deformity'.*
And yet this misshapen creature is convinced that he is what
—
man was always meant to be warts and all and he defines human —
nature in terms of his own nature, his own weaknesses and his
own vices. He may be aware that there is a great deal wrong in the
human situation, but he defines this in terms of current progressive
ideals. To suggest to him that it is precisely these ideals which are
mistaken and that our troubles are due, not to the obstacles in the
way of reaching our goal, but to the initial choice of goal is to
* Centuries of Meditation: Thomas Traherne, 11:4.

9
 INTRODUCTION
propose the unthinkable. A superstitious faith in progress endures
even when the dogma of progress has been exposed as an illusion.
So deeply rooted is this superstition that one hardly dare tell
people that anything is wrong. Their reaction, comparable to an
involuntary muscular spasm, is to spring into ill-considered and
often destructive action. Problems, they believe, exist only to be
dealt with at once, usually by wielding the surgeon's knife on the
body politic, and they cannot admit that such solutions revolu- —
tion, reform, new legislation, further technological development
and more extensive exploitation of the earth's resources— only too
often breed a new generation of even more intractable evils. Such
an admission might compel them to keep still for a while, to look
and to listen, and perhaps even to learn to live with the shadows
which are inseparable from the light of day.
In any case, obsessive concern with the future of the human race
is a uniquely modern phenomenon. We can live —
and live well
without optimism and, for that matter, without the pessimism of
so-called 'doomsters' who are, for the most part, only disappointed
optimists. These are sentimentalities we can ill afford under present
conditions and, particularly from the Islamic point of view, they
have no real meaning. The Muslim does not easily forget that, as
men and women, we are all 'doomed' since we must surely die,
and that societies, civilisations and worlds are equally mortal
'Everything that is upon the earth passes away, and there remains
only the Face of thy Lord, infinite in Glory and infinite in Bounty.'*
Eternity is One and One alone is eternal.
;

This, in a sense, is all we need to know, and indeed the sensible

man, though he may pretend a fashionable concern for the human
future, behaves much like an actor who cares little how long the
theatre in which he is playing will stand, after the play is done.
Moreover, for the Muslim as for the Christian of earlier times, this
earth and all its people are in the hands of God, whose will is

unchangeable ;and it scarcely matters whether he means us to

continue for a thousand years or for a hundred or to enjoy our —
final dawn tomorrow —
since all things must take their course and
all is ultimately well disposed. Our business is to fulfil, here and

now, the function we were born to fulfil.

This book is concerned, above all, with what it means to be a
man in terms of the traditional view of human nature. There
* Quran, 55-27-

10
 INTRODUCTION
exists no common ground between this view and the image which
the man of our time sees in his mirror ; the image of a clever animal
born to exploit the earth's wealth, whether for his own enjoyment
or in the service of his society, until his little light is extinguished
and darkness takes him. In the traditional view, the fulfilment of
the human function is to live as a 'symbol' rather than as a transient
individuality — one of numberless motes of dust caught briefly in a
shaft of sunlight— and to live in this way is, in a certain sense,
to represent man as such. The height of this function reaches the
heavens, and its breadth encompasses the furthest horizon.

But since man as we know him is a fragmentary being, it is

wholeness that he seeks in order to become what in truth he is.
In the Christian context this wholeness is to be achieved through
the imitation of Christ. Equivalents exist in every religion, and in
each case the fragmentary being left to his own devices and without
a model- the masterless man
-
—
is seen as a stray dog foraging on

the outskirts of the human village. The role we are offered in the
mirrors we hold up to ourselves — novels, plays and films — is,

precisely, a stray dog's role and it is played out in a remote and

sunless wasteland ; for our present locality is so far distant from
the world inhabited by the men of earlier times that we have no
yardstick by which to measure it. We can only attempt to describe
such remoteness in images that ma\ seem tancitul.

Let us imagine a summer landscape, bounded only by our

limited vision but in truth unbounded ; a landscape of hills and
valleys, forests but containing also every feature that
and rivers,
an inventive mind might bring to thought. Let us suppose that
somewhere in this measureless extension a child has been blowing
bubbles for the sheer joy of seeing them carried on the breeze,
catching the sunlight, drifting between earth and sky. And then
let us compare all that we know of our world, the earth and what

it contains, the sun, the moon and the stars, to one such bubble, a
single one. It is there in our imagined landscape. It exists. But it is

a very small thing,and in a few moments it is gone.

This, at least, is one way of indicating the traditional or
taking the word in its widest sense the religious view of our —
world and of how it is related to all that lies beyond it. Perhaps the
image may be pursued a step further. The bubble's skin reflects
what lies outside and is, at the same time, transparent. Those who
1
 INTRODUCTION
live within may be aware of the landscape in quite different ways.
Those whose weak or untrained may still surmise its
sight is

existence and, believing what they are told by others who see
more clearly, have faith in it. Secondly, there are some who will
perceive within the bubble itself reflections of what lies outside
and begin to realise that everything within is neither more nor less
than a reflection and has no existence in its own right. Thirdly,
as by a miracle of sight, there will be a few for whom transparency
is real and actual. Their vision pierces the thin membrane which to

others seems opaque and, beyond faith, they see what is to be

seen.
These three kinds of people differ greatly, but this difference
isas nothing compared with the gulf which separates them from
those who take the bubble for all-in-all and deny that anything
real lies outside this tiny sphere. What is truth for the men of
faith and the men of vision is, for those others, illusion. No com-
mon language exists, and the very names given to the objects of
experience mean different things. The physically blind still believe
in a world described to them by the sighted even though they
may not be able to imagine it, but these blind hearts deny sight.
For Islam this distinction between 'believer' and 'unbeliever'
is the most fundamental distinction that it is possible to make

between human beings, and beside it differences of temperament

or character, let alone of race or class, fade into insignificance. The
'unbelievers' are not simply people who do not share a particular
belief ;
they are the kafiriin, the people who are 'covered over',
muffled — as it —
were in tissues of illusion from the impact of
reality, shrouded from the light 'as if, says the Quran, 'their faces
had been cloaked with darkness.'
No less a gulf divides those who 'know' from the 'ignorant' in the
context of Hinduism; and Christians, before the modern age
undermined their faith, thought it legitimate to put unbelievers
and heretics to death rather than allow the contagion of their
blindness to spread. However shocking such severity may seem to
the people of our time, for whom everything outside the bubble
is either fiction or, at best, a pious hope, we would be wrong to

imagine that the Christians of earlier times were therefore lacking

in charity. They would have seen little virtue in sparing those who,
they believed, were poisoning the wells of charity itself and gravely
endangering the souls of their fellow men, their neighbours and

] 2
 INTRODUCTION
their kindred. In this century in which such vast numbers of
people have been slaughtered in the name of mere political opinions,
secular ideologies, it would be absurd for any of us to feel self-
righteous or to speak condescendingly of 'fanaticism' in relation
to the wars of religion or the suppression of heresy
and infidelity.
There is a saying of the Prophet which again Muhammad
underlines the difference of proportion between the world as we
know it and all that lies outside. 'I swear by God', he said, 'that
this world in comparison with the world to come is as though one
of you put his finger into the sea Let him consider what he
. . .

brings out on it !' Between droplet and ocean there can be no

common measure.
No one, of course, would suggest that every believer of earlier
times,Muslim, Christian or Hindu, was aware of the disproportion
between the world of his day-to-day experience and the surround-
ing ocean of reality or even that piety necessarily requires such
awareness. But the bedrock truth of a religious doctrine is not
established by holding an opinion poll among its adherents. The
moment the idea of a revealed religion presents itself, the moment
we speak of God or of the supernatural (properly understood), this
disproportion is implied, and it colours all that is said or thought.
Take away, and you remove the fulcrum upon which the whole
it

structure revolves. You are left with a religion that is little more
than sentimental idealism, idle day-dreaming or wishful thinking ;

worldly religion, on the same level as the secular ideologies.

In a period of history which readily makes an idol of 'knowledge'
and in which people treat with derision the 'ignorance' of past
ages, there an astonishing ignorance of what only a few genera-
is —
tions ago — was regarded as the most important of all subjects
and so regarded among at least half the world's population.
is still

The extent and depth of this ignorance, not only of religion in

general and its metaphysical bases, but even of quite elementary
aspects of their own religion — if they claim to have one —among
'educated' people might be compared to the ignorance of nuclear
physics one would expect to find among the pygmies of Zaire ;
and
yet they have no hesitation in expressing firm and even dogmatic
opinions on the subject.
In Britain the educational system provides classes in what is
humorously described as 'Religious Knowledge', although no
doctrine is taught and the distinction between religious and secular

13
 INTRODUCTION
thought is never touched upon. A culture which shows such
casual indifference to the subject which has dominated human
lives and human minds throughout history, at least until very
recently and in a particular locality, is indeed abnormal, to say the
least, and, in view of its attitude towards the beliefs which have
—
determined and validated or invalidated all other forms of —
knowledge, can hardly expect to be taken seriously when it makes
portentous pronouncements upon politics or morality or upon the
human situation as such.
If in the course of this book I appear to dismiss a great deal of
'modern thought' with something less than the respect and atten-
tion it is assumed to merit, this is not least because these 'thinkers'
have seen fit to dismiss equally casually all that had been considered
until quite recently, by the wisest and noblest men whose records
are known to us, to give weight and validity to human thinking.
Those who refuse to listen should not expect to be heard.
I do not mean to suggest that theoretic knowledge is a pre-
requisite of faith or that a mancannot love God unless he is a
philosopher. Far from it. But the simple believer of earlier times
who knew very little yet possessed great faith could scarcely
survive in the modern world, bombarded ceaselessly with the argu-
ments of unbelief. Doctrinal knowledge has become almost essen-
tial for those who would hold fast to their religion against the tide.
A hundred years ago a man could be a good Christian and remain
so without ever having heard of St Augustine or Aquinas ;
ignorant
faith was protected, and therefore sufficed. Today a Christian
who does not have some knowledge of the doctrines upon which his
faith is founded stands in mortal peril, unless protected by an
impregnable simplicity.
But it is not simply arguments that threaten him and must be
answered. It is something more overwhelming and yet less easily
definable a climate of opinion, even an unspoken 'consensus'.
:

As Frithjof Schuon says 'When people want to be rid of Heaven

:

it is logical to start by creating an atmosphere in which spiritual

things appear out of place ; in order to be able to declare success-

fully that God is unreal they have to construct around man a false
reality, a reality that is inevitably inhuman because only the
inhuman can exclude God. What is involved is a falsification of
the imagination and so its destruction.'*
* Understanding Islam: Frithjof Schuon, p. 37.
 INTRODUCTION
Just as each age has its pattern of assumptions which are taken
for granted, so, in every age, there are certain ideas which appear
by their very nature improbable. No process of reasoning is

required to establish this improbability ; and because the products

of the period — and architecture, the human environment,
its art

the things men do and

the things they make both reflect and —
reinforce current assumptions, the improbable soon becomes
quite unimaginable.
Everything in the environment except virgin nature and certain
relics of the past then confirms these assumptions, and an effort of
will is required to think about them critically, let alone sceptically.
It is asthuugh a process of osmosis took place between human
beings and their immediate surroundings the outward reflects ;

the inward and is shaped by it, while the inward is moulded by the
outward. The religious point of view, with all that it implies in the
way of a sense of the sacred and awe in the face of that which
transcends us, comes naturally to the average man only if he lives

in an environment which reflects the light of heaven, however

inadequately, and which feeds some glimmer of this light to his
senses. In a completely opaque environment the landscape outside
our bubble becomes unimaginable and God himself is the Great
Improbability.
The particular difiicultv pious Muslims untouched by modern-
ism have always had in understanding the unbeliever or recog-
nising him as a man of the same nature as themselves derives
from the fact that, for such true believers, the truth of their religion
— the divine Unity and all that it implies— is so overwhelmingly
self-evident that to deny it is like denying the desert sun when one
stands in its full glare.The notion that the unbeliever's views are
in some way to be respected would strike them as both foolish
and wicked.
On the other hand, the difficulty most people in the modern
world experience in trying to understand 'this terrifying faith'
(as a French Islamicist has described it) derives from the fact
that the overwhelming and, above all, exclusive reality of the
everyday world seems to them equally self-evident and equally
unquestionable. In either case it is almost impossible to doubt
what seems so obvious. Such is the power that a climate of opinion
and the environment it forges have over us.
It might be objected that Western Europe and the United States

l
5
 INTRODUCTION
are still 'Christian' in a rather general sense. Whether people who
lived at any time in the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era
would have recognised them as such is another matter. For those
earlier Christians, as for traditionally minded Muslims, Hindus
or Buddhists today, there are certain things which take priority
in human living, and there is one priority which dwarfs all others.
There is the Absolute and there is the relative, and no common
measure exists by which we might compare the importance of the
one with that of the other. No such sense of priorities directs the
humanistic morality of our time nor, for that matter, does it im-
pinge upon those of our contemporaries who have some vague
belief in a cosy afterlife available to anyone who behaves decently
and 'does his best'.
Today the dividing line between mutually irreconcilable views
—
between belief and unbelief has become blurred and neither
faith nor infidelity are followed through to their logical conclusions.
There is a kind of twilight region inhabited by the many who are
neither believers nor unbelievers, but are carried along by the
tide of these times while daylight lasts. There must, they think,
be 'something' beyond all this, but they doubt whether anybody
really knows what this 'something' might be and seem quite
unaware of great voices, still audible, telling them precisely what
it is and summoning them to attend as a man attends when he

stands in mortal peril. Living in a culture which has become in

its very nature the kafir's cloak of darkness, nothing that lies out-
side their little pool of light seems quite real, and, if they think of

divine reality at all, they think of it as something ghostly, abstract,

attenuated —the desert sun no longer scorches or dazzles.
It is hardly surprising therefore that religion, if it survives at
all been cut off from what might
in such a hostile environment, has
be called its vertical dimension and has been engulfed in world-
liness not worldliness as we have become accustomed to hearing
;

—
the word used wine, women and song (or their equivalents)
have never had much power against religious conviction but in —
the sense of an exclusive concern with the things of this world, a
concern which has proved all the more seductive because it has
been made to seem so worthy. It is true that the virtue of charity
flows from the love of God, but this does not mean that a 'social
conscience' is an adequate substitute for that love.
The new religious morality which gives priority to social and
16
 INTRODUCTION
economic considerations stands condemned in the light of all that
was believed by men of faith until quite recently condemned ;

for the good reason that it has adopted the unbeliever's scale of
priorities and surrendered itself to the process of change, abandon-
ing the immutable principles of which religious institutions are
the custodians. This however is a situation which suits the ir-
religious very well they might be disturbed by a real priest, like
;

grubs under a stone when their covering is lifted by some mighty

hand, but they can fraternise happily with a social worker in
clerical garb. The people, on the other hand, the real people who
ask almost shamefacedly for faith, hope and caritas, true love,
get little comfort from men as uncertain and insecure as them-
selves. All they are offered is a bland religion which has fitted
itself only too well into the framework of contemporary civilisation,

a civilisation which derives its basic assumptions, its values and its
logic, from profane sources from the humanism and rationalism
;

of the French 'Knlightenment', from the Titanic self-assertion of

the Renaissance and, more remotely, from the worst features of
two ancient cultures, those of Greece and of Rome, which were
already decadent in terms of the human norm when they be-

queathed to us our classical heritage and over which Christianity

triumphed all too briefly.
So many ruins bear witness to good intentions which went
astray, good inte ntions unenlightened by any glimmer of wisdom.
To bring religion to the people is a tine and necessary undertaking,
but this is not a situation in which the proposed end can be said
to justify the means. The further people have drifted from the
truth, the greater is the temptation to water down the truth,
glossing over its less palatable aspects and, in short, allowing a
policy ofcompromise to become one of adulteration. In this way
it —
hoped that the common man if he can be found will be
is —
encouraged to find a small corner in his busy life for religion
without having to change his ways or to grapple with disturbing
thoughts. It is a forlorn hope. Standing, as it were, at the pave-

ment's edge with his tray of goods, the priest reduces the price
until he is offering his wares for nothing divine Judgment is a
:

myth, hell a wicked superstition, prayer less important than decent

behaviour, and God himself dispensable in the last resort; and
still the passers-by go their way, sorry over having to ignore such
a nice man but with more important matters demanding their

17
 INTRODUCTION
attention. And yet these matters with which they are most urgently
concerned are, for so many of them, quicksands in which they
feel themselves trapped. Had they been offered a real alternative,
a rock firm-planted from the beginning of time, they might have
been prepared to pay a high price.
It is even possible, had the priest turned his back upon them,
attending only to the divine sun which seizes and holds his gaze,
they might have come up quietly behind him, knelt down looking —
—
where he looks and forgotten all their care and all their troubles.
It might be said that the basic command of religion is not 'Do this !'
or 'Do not do that !', but simply 'Look !' The rest follows.

Since unbelief lies at the root of almost all that is said or thought
or done in our time, it follows that the believer's critique of the
modern world cannot be less than radical. One does not try to
prettify a leper or to treat his 'lion face' with cosmetics. But
radical criticism must have an end in view, and since the world's
course will not be reversed by any action we can take nor the ages
—
of faith return before the end of time as we understand time
it might reasonably be asked what point there is in playing Canute

and trying to defy the tide. Great men and wise men in the past
have readily turned their backs on a heedless world or a hell-bent
society, setting an example to those few who were prepared to
come their way, but never supposing that the mass of people
could be persuaded to walk a different road. Were it possible for
those who whole structure of opinion and ideology upon
reject the
which contemporary societies are based to go their way in peace,
—
one might say and even fifty years ago one could have said that —
this would be the better course.
The justification for adopting a different policy today and for
raising the dust of polemical argument lies in the uniqueness of
our present situation, the uniqueness of the attempt, secular
societies are now making to absorb into their process the whole
man, body and soul. There is going to be no more 'opting out'.
Cornered, one has no alternative but to turn and fight and those ;

of us who do not accept the assumptions of this age, its priorities

and its moral imperatives, are indeed driven into a corner. In
—
judging our world and it is not for nothing that men have been
—
given some power of discrimination we are compelled to weigh
one society against another no longer in terms of relative excellence

18
 INTRODUCTION
(though some, obviously, are greatly superior to others) but chiefly
interms of how far they have gone in seizing and possessing their
citizens.
Just as growing populations in Africa and elsewhere encroach
more and more upon the open spaces in which the wild beasts
roam, and a time may be foreseen when no space remains and such
beasts as survive are confined to game reserves (like the 'savages'
of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World), so the men of independent
mind who cannot take this bubble-world for all-in-all will soon
have nowhere to go and no possibility of escape from the demands
of society or from the conditioning which it imposes upon all its

citizens from an early That conditioning or, to use a current

age.
phrase, that 'brainwashing' process will undo their truth if it can,
and will in any case prevent coming generations even from sur-
mising that such a truth exists or that men have any other function
but to be socially and economically useful.
Since there are no longer any sacred societies except perhaps —
in a few distant and isolated corners of the globe the question —
which must be asked is not whether a particular social system is

benevolent, efficient, well-ordered, but whether it still leaves

breathing-space for the sacred and still tolerates outsiders and
eccentrics who resist incorporation. What is at stake is of such
magnitude that those who still have sight of another shore, if

only in imagination, and of a beauty beside which all earthly

colours are reduced to monochrome cannot be other than 'ex-
tremists' in this context no middle way remains open and we are
;

compelled by the circumstances of our time to make a choice,

having the doubtful privilege of living, here and now, in a decisive
moment.
The book is concerned less with the role of
earlier part of this
religion in the world today than with the nature of modern secular
societies as seen from the point of view of religion and with their
clear, often explicit, tendency to close all the exits, level all the
heights and confine the human being, made in the divine image
and fit for greatness, within his purely terrestial modalities, his
economic function and his role as a social animal. This tendency
cannot be resisted on its own level, for on that level such trends
— —
have a power almost an inevitability such as we associate with
the forces of nature. The religious standpoint alone provides solid
ground for resistance, but here it must be emphasised that the

19
 INTRODUCTION
reference is to an implacable religion rooted in the transcendent,
not to sentimental religiosity and pious platitudes.
Only on this basis is it possible to help those who, though they
may submit to the pressures put upon them to conform to the
collectivist morality of the age, do so in doubt and uncertainty.
Only from this standpoint is it possible to assure them that their
doubts spring from a sound and healthy instinct and are supported
by the whole weight of human tradition. It is with the nature of
this tradition that the second part of the book is concerned.
But how is it possible to speak of 'religion* in this context, when
there are many religions and they appear to differ on so many
points? This is not the place to enter into complex arguments
in proof of the essential unity of the religions, but something must
be said about the doctrine of 'perspectives' which provides a key
to the understanding of this unity.
Truth is one, but it is also infinite and therefore beyond form
(since, in the nature of things, one form excludes others: an
object cannot be at the same time both square and round). On the
human level however truth necessarily conforms itself to the con-
tours of the human mind, but for which it would be totally in-
conceivable, and it is shaped by the environment in which it finds
expression, as it is also by the character of the people among whom
it assumes a body of images, concepts and moral prescriptions

much as light is fragmented into visible colours by the medium

through which it passes. The display of diversity is, in a certain
and it would be astonishing if
sense, the raison d'etre of existence,
the religions through which men
have apprehended reality did
not partake most richly of that diversity. This may perhaps be
illustrated in terms of an imagery different to that of the 'bubble'
and its boundless landscape, but complementary to it.
Let us now imagine another landscape, surrounded this time by
a desert which has no discernible end, but in itself fertile and
inhabited by many nations, many tribes, set as it were in a circle
around a great mountain which stands alone, filling the view.
This mountain, in its overwhelming grandeur, may be known in a
variety of ways by those who live within sight of it as, being human,
do all the nations and all the tribes.
There will be some few who know it as a whole, either because
they have climbed it or because their sight has been inspired and
has miraculously embraced its many aspects in a single identity.

20
 INTRODUCTION
There will be others who see it from a particular and necessarily
limited point of view, discerning certain features very clearly and
therefore, so far as their perspective permits, seeing truly. Thirdly
there are many whose eyesight is faulty or who are handicapped by
distance so that mist intervenes, distorting vision, and among
these there is bitter disagreement and much uncertainty. Finally
there are those whose faculties may be sound enough but who stand
with their backs to the mountain, describing quite accurately what
they see on the drab plain before them ; but what they see is of
little consequence, and so long as they stay in this posture they can
make no useful comment on
the mountain or any of its aspects,
disqualified as they are from taking part in the controversies of
those who looked in the right direction. For their part however
they are convinced that no one sees anything more than is visible
to them. There is nothing there, no power and no glory; nothing.
The mountain, of course, is an image of the truth. The mountain
is what is. The mountain is Reality, beside which nothing else is

entirely real. The mountain is at the centre of the circle and all ;

ways, if they do not lead to it, lead into the desert where men die
of thirst, plagued by chimera.
Among those who have seen it as a whole or, at the very least,

surmise its wholeness there is no cause for controversy, unless over

semantics, but among the others a conflict between rival perspec-

tives almost inevitable. In this context and only in this context
is —
— both sides in a war may be right (and rightly claim that God is
with them), for both have truth, albeit a partial truth, on their
side and it is in the nature of things that truth, fragmented,
;

should be a source of conflict. So great is their power and their

radiance, when such splinters of truth are embedded in the hearts

and minds of combative men, that life seems of little account and
death a bagatelle.
We are told by those who have received the gift of clarity that
the truth is of a dazzling simplicity ; but the variety of ways in
which perceived, understood and expressed is of vast
it may be
complexity. This fact need not be in any way daunting, since it
corresponds to the variety and complexity of the human minds to
which truth is directed but there can be little excuse for those who,
;

while they reject simple and unquestioning faith as too naive

for their taste, ask questions but will not wait for the answers.
Among such as these are many who will devote a lifetime of effort

21
 INTRODUCTION
and study to some trivial subject of entirely transient interest, but
who regard the acquisition of the supreme knowledge —
once
thought to be the greatest treasure which this world secretes among
its gold and jewels — as a matter scarcely worth their trouble unless
it is easily accessible. So it is that they by-pass their human heri-

tage and fritter away their powers.

This age in which we live stands condemned in terms of human
normality precisely because it encourages men to dream their lives
away in forgetfulness of their heritage and of those few things
which they really need to know. Here lies the root of its sickness
and there, in that heritage, is the rock to which those who refuse
to slide away in the current must for ever hold fast.
 I
l.WREAL CITIES

With every choice we make some detail is added to the picture

which, when it is completed, will show what we are uniquely and
unrepeatably, and the effects of this choice will spread out, as
rings spread from the stone tossed into a pool. The people around
us will undergo some change, however small, but, far beyond this
neighbourhood, the effects reach out to shores of which we
scarcely dream. The choice we make is ours and no one else's
ours too are its numberless repercussions. We are responsible and
answerable, here or elsewhere, now or later, for all that bears our
stamp.
For this to be understood in an immediate, practical sense,
men must have a certain freedom of movement and the space in
which to deploy their possibilities. Choice is not enough. There
must be the opportunity to exercise it, for good or ill and without ;

this opportunity the verv idea of personal responsibility is drained

of meaning. There are limitations inherent in human choice,
which reflect the limitations of the human state as such when it is
considered, so to speak, from above and in terms of an absolute
Will of which our powers are only a fragmentary image. But this
is another matter, and in what follows we are concerned with the
human level, the human experience. At this level and in terms of
this experience, men are creatures made and are, as
for choosing
such, responsible beings, accountable for what done in their
is

little world, but with a responsibility which extends far beyond

its limits since we arc not, by nature, entirely confined in our

mortal shells. So long as true common sense is not overlaid by the

complex falsities and sophistries of an unwise age, we know this
well enough.
Children show, by the questions they ask when they first dis-

cover the use of words, their need to make sense of the world.
Faced with the broken vase, spilt milk or eyeless doll they ask:

23
 KING OF THE CASTLE
Who did it ? Older, with the gift of simplicity behind us, we still

want to ask the same question, though can far less certain that it

be answered. The need to attribute acts and events to the person

responsible for them is a universal human need.
Of all the changes that have taken place in the human condition
over the past hundred years none is more significant than the
increasing difficultywe now have in tracing acts to their owners.
In earlier times and in more simple societies each act was branded
with its owner's name. In the complex societies of today it might
take the combined efforts of a detective and a moral philosopher
to trace any given act to any one person. The State, the society
or the organisation acts. 'They' act. But 'they' cannot be loved
or blamed or touched. The need to attribute acts to men or women
like ourselves finds no satisfaction.
It has become essential to redefine the idea of human responsi-
bility in relation to a society of jobholders and civil servants, a

world in which the majority of men are absorbed into vast collec-
tivities and appear to have as little personal stake in their own
actions as the slaves or bondmen of other times. This has become
all the more necessary because, so far as it is possible to make any
predictions about the future, there are good reasons for believing
that our world is moving towards ever more complex degrees of
organisation and that the man who is neither a jobholder nor,
directly or indirectly, a servant of the State will soon be regarded
as a complete eccentric if not as an outcast. For socialist societies
acknowledged aim. Under capitalism it is the unintended
this is the
but nonetheless unavoidable outcome, witness the fact that in
that home of 'free enterprise', the United States, ninety per cent
of the employed now work in organisations of one kind or another,
whereas at the beginning of this century ninety percent were self-
employed.
The survival of the kind of world we have made for ourselves
— in the context of advancing technology and of the growth of
—
populations depends upon a high degree of organisation and
increasing collectivism, whatever the ideological flag under which
it may sail. This world will try to survive for as long as it can,

whatever the cost that has to be paid in loss of freedom and de-
struction of values.
To those who believe men to be more adaptable than in fact
they are, it seems strange that an age in which so much responsi-

24
 UNREAL CITIES
bility is lifted from individual shoulders and transferred to the
impersonal machinery of the State should yet be an age of acute
anxiety and insecurity. But most men need some weight well
adjusted to their strength if they are to walk well and confidently.
Without this weight their feet no longer cleave to the ground and,
though still incapable of flight, they lose the power to walk. Here,
then, is a further basic need. We must not only know to whom acts
belong, if the world is to make sense we must also understand the
;

nature of our own responsibility and have some notion of the

obligations natural to us. Otherwise we swing in uneasy alternation
between, on the one hand, an irresponsibility that is seldom free
from the sense of guilt and, on the other, an exaggerated notion
of our duties and obligations. Both scamp and busybody are
products of a land without boundary marks.
If the thought of boundary marks and guidelines brings with it a
flavour of constraint this is because we think of them as artificially

imposed, disfiguring the landscape in which we live a line of —

slick white posts marching up the hillside —
whereas the only truly
effective fences are eithe r inherent in the landscape itself or else
so timeworn and familiar as to be virtually invisible. Men need a
framework but they should not know —or at least should not be
constantly reminded that they are living within the limitations
of a framework, leu people are troubled by the limitations which
their bodies impose upon them- the need for sleep, the unremit-
ting demands of hunger and thirst but if our bodies changed in
form and in capability from week to week our existence would be a
nightmare.
That should be necessary to think about frameworks and
it

to talk asthough they could be devised and constructed according

to convenience is itself a sign of the revolution that has taken place
in the conditions of human living. Although it has its roots in
changes initiated some hundreds of years ago, the effects of this
revolution have only now encompassed the mass of mankind, and
even Western world it is only in the past century that the
in the
majority of men and women have felt its full impact. Gustave
Thibon, the French Catholic writer, wrote eloquently some years
ago of that 'millennial equilibrium' which, by the very fact of its
endurance, had every chance of being in conformity with the needs
of human nature an equilibrium only quite recently shattered.
;

Powerfully aided by modern technology, our contemporary

25
 KING OF THE CASTLE
'myths' —evolutionary, egalitarian, materialistic —have,
as he
said, torn the individual away from the great cosmic and social
continuities, the earth, the craft, the family, which had been the
normal setting of human lives.
The framework has never before been transformed in such
radical fashion. Changes in the conditions of living had always,
until now, taken place within a pattern that seemed unchanging to
the men within its bounds, however it might appear to the bird's-
eye-view of the historian. A dozen generations would hardly
provide time enough to assimilate what has happened since the
turn of the century and to assess it. We do not have the time. We
come to terms, as any creature concerned with survival would do,
but the greater part of what is happening escapes our full attention.
Everything becomes a blur when you travel beyond a certain
speed. Distant objects may still be clear in outline, but the blurred
foreground makes it impossible to attend to them. This landscape
is unreal and the passengers in the express train turn to their books,

their thoughts or their private fantasies.

The subjectivism of our age has a good deal to do with this
imprisonment in a speeding vehicle, and the fact that we made this
vehicle ourselves, with all the tireless care that children give to a
contrivance of wood and wire, does not save us from the sense of
being trapped without hope of escape.
A further effect of such vertiginous speed is a kind of anaesthesia,
entirely natural when the operation of the senses by which we
normally make contact with our environment is suspended. With
no opportunity to assimilate what is going on, our powers of
assimilation are inevitably weakened and a certain numbness sets
in ;
nothing savoured and nothing is properly understood.
is fully
Even fear (which exists to forewarn us of danger) is suspended.
This would be so even if speed of change were the only factor
involved, but the kind of environment in which a large part of
—
humanity lives today the environment created by technology at
the service of immediate, short-term needs does much to in- —
tensify this effect. Outside of works of art which embody some-
thing beyond our physical needs, our own constructions bore us.
Those who, when they have built something and admired the
finished product for a decent moment, are ready to pull it down and
start on something new have good sense on their side. To live in an
entirely man-made environment, in the midst of a clutter of our

26
 UNREAL CITIES
own products, is to be isolated in a narrow world which gives no
play to the capacity we have for reaching out to what lies beyond
the human realm as such.
In its ugliness and also in its remoteness from the natural world,
this environment is a kind of projection of the unbeliever's psyche,
as it is of his philosophy. It does not set out to provide spiritual
nourishment — why should it, since the intention is only to satisfy
certain 'practical' exigencies ? — and, though it may excite them, it

does not appease the senses. It offers only a setting in which cease-
lessand, for the most part, aimless activity can take place.
There is nothing in common between, on the one hand, the
stupor produced by an environment which offers no nourishment
and, on the other, that 'sleep of the senses' induced by a beauty
which melts the barriers between one world and another or by —
such concentration of attention upon what lies beyond the im-
mediate grasp of the senses that perceived reality becomes, not
blurred, but transparent. For beauty to penetrate or for concentra-
tion tobecome stabilised, time and stillness are necessary. The
speed with which events follow one upon another in the modern
context, the speed with which the very framework in which these
events occur changes shape, must banish both from our lives ;

and, in a landscape of blurred outlines, the exercise of responsible

choice between sharply perceived alternatives — which also re-
quires time and stillness — becomes doubly difficult.

Anenvironment that never stays still can only breed men whose
capacity for choosing is maimed and shaken. How can one choose

between the waves of the sea ? And man himself, neither physically
rooted nor spiritually nourished, is far from being a fixed point
in this shifting scene. I lis changing environment compels him to
adjust to unstable currents and veering winds, conditioning him
in terms of an instability which undermines all capacity for judg-
ment. Indeed, if the world his kind have made is to maintain its
momentum, he must adapt and keep pace or fall so he is led to —
believe —
into some no-man's-land of unreality for this, he is :

told, is the real world there is nowhere else to go, so make the best
;

of it.

He, the ordinary man, the member of the multitude, has been
ripped out of the environment of solid, tangible things which
in terms of —
human generations stay put, and has been made into
something functional and interchangeable.

27
 KING OF THE CASTLE
The who mistreats the soil or neglects his crops
peasant farmer
is very soon made
know the error of his ways, and the fact that
to
one kind of reality presses so hard upon him and refuses to be
ignored or falsified teaches him to discriminate in other fields
between the real and the fantastic, the necessary and the super-
fluous. Whereas the official or the jobholder, a unit in a vast organi-
sation, may survive a lifetime of gross errors and mistaken notions
before reality catches up with him. Thibon, who was himself of
peasant origin, wrote 'If peasants have as many faults (as other
:

men), they have less perversions. Rather than their virtue, it is

their health that I praise'. He did not mean by 'perversion' quite
what moralists would understand by this term. Perversion is
essentially an act of turning away from reality at any level, from
the earth at our feet or from the sky above us, a retreat from the
light into private darkness.
To our sophisticated palates the peasant is not altogether an
attractive figure, —
but he represents take him or leave him —
way of life shows up, by force of contrast, the fragility and
that
rootlessness of the new ways which have taken its place. The
Communists, those high professionals in the craft of manipulating
and exploiting human material, have often found him a prickly
mouthful to swallow.
The small businessman or trader is also brought constantly
face to face with the consequences of his own actions in a way that
the member of a big organisation is not. The latter depends, for
his success or failure, upon the uncertain and often unrealistic
judgment of his fellow men (already the decisive factor in his
personal and social life) rather than upon the firm pressure of
natural forces which would back at him the results of his
fling
acts with an infallible precision such as his fellow men can never
achieve. For the jobholder, the consequences of action return to
him filtered through human media, so that he can always attribute
them to the good will or malice of his superiors rather than to his
own actions. What was once a simple and direct connection be-
tween naked act and equally naked effect has become immensely
complex and open to a variety of interpretations. Subjectivism
intervenes at every level and it is hard for any man to learn what
truth means and how it differs from falsehood and fabrication.
The effects of an unstable and, at the same time, artificial
environment are plain enough, as are those of work in which

28
 UNREAL CITIES
consequences cannot be directly related to their causes ; but there
is a further element in modern societies which does at least as
much to undermine the free exercise of choice and responsibility.
This is the protection which society is now expected to give its

citizens : protection not only against ill fortune and disaster, but
also against all the ills they might bring upon themselves. And
here we enter a region of moral ambiguity. It is natural to shelter
from a storm and equally natural to share this shelter with our
neighbours. Only a fool exposes himself willingly to injury and
only a rogue ignores his neighbour's danger. But there is a limit
to the obligation we have —or even to the right we have —to
protect others against the results of their own follies or vices. Just
as pain is necessary to warn us of the body's malfunction, so there
are misfortunes which fulfil a necessary function and but for which
human beings would never achieve maturity or learn the nature
of their world.
To assume that people will behave like irresponsible children
if given the chance and, on these grounds, to deny them the chance
leads to a suffocating paternalism which ends by destroying what
it most cherishes and to insist upon protecting us against every
;

possibility of injury from other men involves binding them secure-

ly, and binding us too, since we are the 'other' in relation to them.

There is a morality which insists that men's arms must be bound

to their sides because some might want to use their fists and
insists that their ankles be tethered because some might want to
walk into trouble. There is only one logical conclusion to such
overwhelming concern for our wellbeing we must all be locked :

up where we can do no harm either to ourselves or to others.

There will be more to be said at a later stage regarding the
curtailment of liberty in the supposed public interest, but it is
worth noting here a phrase which recurs again and again in the
press, on television and in conversation : this is to the effect that
when human lives are weighed against 'a small loss of personal
freedom' one should not hesitate to make the necessary sacrifice.

This phrase may one day be carved over the grave of our liberties,

for those who seem quite unaware that a number of 'small

use it

losses' soon add up to one great loss. There have indeed been
thousands, if not tens of thousands of such losses in recent years.
They have been readily accepted because the majority of people
think they know the limits beyond which they themselves

2*9
 KING OF THE CASTLE
would refuse to tolerate further deprivations of personal free-
dom.
It is assumed that there is some kind of natural, regulative
mechanism which can be guaranteed to stop the process of con-
finement and enslavement before it reaches a point either absurd
or intolerable. The fact is that conditions of life which would have
seemed both absurd and intolerable to an earlier generation are
accepted without protest by a later one which has started out, so to
speak, from a point lower on the scale. There is, strictly speaking,
no limit set to the accumulation of small losses. What we have
always to bear in mind is not the significance of one new law or
regulation —possibly trivial in itself —but the direction in which it

points, the tendency it betrays and the place it occupies in the

context of similar laws and regulations preceding it or likely to
follow it. With mind, we may begin to see a great number of
this in
the measures imposed upon us for our own protection as points
in the plotting of a graph which is both sinister and menacing in its
implications.
Meanwhile, in our relatively comfortable straight-jacket and
filled with a sense of virtue (are we not the first people who have
ever truly cared for our fellows ?), we become increasingly depen-
—
dent upon the paternal or perhaps one should say, maternal
society and accept its benefits without really considering the price
that must be paid for one effect of such protected environments
;

is that they destroy the normal human awareness that everything

in this world has its price tag. Another effect is that the sense of
personal responsibility atrophies like an unused muscle what ;

need is there for us to do anything for this child or that old person
when everything can be safely left in other hands ? When we meet
with injury and injustice we call upon 'them' to do something
about it and, if we take action at all, it is to demand new laws,
new regulations to deal with the situation. Unfortunately such
legislation is comparable to generalised radiation treatment, which
kills the healthy cells with the malignant ones.

Those who meet the consequences of their actions day in and

day out do not need to have the idea of responsibility the idea —
that each act has an owner to whom its effects return explained —
to them its physical demonstration is imprinted on their flesh.
:

—
Others the jobholder, the functionary, the children of the
paternalistic State —
are provided with no such object lessons and

30
 UNREAL CITIES
they lose, in consequence, their sense of reality. This loss of the
sense of living in a world which rings true when struck is accom-
panied by a weakening of man's idea of himself as a being capable
of acting upon an environment which includes not only the middle
world in which his daily life is passed, but also the dimensions of
heaven and hell. Perhaps the very idea of responsibility, as applied
to the image of man presented by contemporary beliefs, is ridicu-
lous this mannikin is too small and too impotent to be the creator
:

and owner of acts which reverberate throughout the worlds.

Whether or not man in the abstract, the alleged conqueror of
nature (able for the first time to inflict enduring wounds upon the
very earth he treads) seems to us a powerful figure, the ordinary
individual in our time feels very little sense of power. He does not
control the campaign of 'conquest', but is subordinated to it so
that it may at times seem like a grotesque accident in which he
happens to have become involved. Few, if any, believe that the
process of scientific and technological 'advance' could be halted
by an act of will on their part, even though many are aware that it
contains the seeds of its own reversal or destruction. If we are
merely spectators of a process that advances whether to glory —
—
or to death regardless of our intentions or desires, while demand-
ing from us all that we have to give of mind and heart and sinew,
then we have little enough upon which to pride ourselves.
People of other times have been blamed and even despised for
the 'fatalism' with which they accepted the conditions of human
life, facing their losses or sufferings as though these things were

unalterably decreed and yet it is as fatalists that most people in

;

our time accept the process in which they are caught up. 'Progress',
it seems, is inevitable, as are its painful side-effects. If it becomes
necessary to use the full resources of nuclear and biological warfare
now available —and our age does not willingly leave its resources
unused — this fatalism will suggest the condition of beasts driven
to the slaughterhouse and perhaps recall to memory those trudging
crowds who went so quietly to death in the gas chambers of Ausch-
witz and Treblinka.
When things go wrong or, to be more honest, when things get
worse instead of better it is readily assumed that this is a temporary
aberration and will soon be put right because there is a natural
law which guarantees progress. Now natural processes carry with
them a strong sense of fatality and inevitability the sun has been
;

31
 KING OF THE CASTLE
rising and setting with predictable regularity for a very long time ;

and although there is strong criticism of certain particular aspects

of our present situation and it is often said that man's 'moral
evolution' has failed to keep pace with his 'mastery' of the physical
world, the majority of people accept without question that the
direction in which we are travelling is the direction dictated by
laws as inevitable as those which govern falling bodies (but in this
case they imagine the body to be a rising one). It is astonishing,
however, that those who have so little regard for natural laws in
general, believing that they can be manipulated at will, should
accept this particular one so meekly ;
unless, of course, it turns out
to be a law that they, not nature, invented. Men who scorn the
idea of submission to the divine Will and are outraged by the
notion of a God who requires submission are among the first to
demand total submission to the process in which we are involved
and seem to attach a kind of moral imperative to willing participa-
tion in it. Any other attitude, so they say, is reactionary or escapist
or anti-social. Perhaps, after all, they have found a divinity to
worship ;
and, if they have, the only charitable comment must be :

God help them

Escaping, as we have done, from the so-called tyranny of
absolute principles derived from religious doctrine which, because
they are not altogether of this world, possess a certain elasticity
as to their practical application and leave room for a variety of
interpretations in terms of the practical life, we have fallen under
the very real tyranny of majority opinion as to what is rightand
what is wrong.
The old morality was stable and lasting, yet it left space for
manoeuvre the new one is rigid and unintelligent but, as though
;

to compensate for this rigidity, it changes from year to year in

terms of fashions in popular opinion and under the influence of
propaganda. Each new doctrine of 'right' and 'wrong' kicks aside
the previous one and struts its little time upon the stage as an
absolute monarch. The man who is filled today with self-righteous-
ness because he acts in accordance with crowd opinion here and
now would have been considered a sinner yesterday and may be
thought a villain tomorrow. It is instructive, in this context, to
study the political speeches of leaders in the West or in the Eastern
Bloc if one wishes to understand the techniques of moral blackmail.
[Their appeal is always to right-thinking people, decent people,

32
 UNREAL CITIES
who only want to act for the best. It is by this technique that men
are gulled, if not into supporting rampant evil, at least into un-
willingness to oppose it.

We do not have the right to despise our fellow men as men.

We do not know their innermost 'secret'. But we have every right
to turn away in contempt from the Great Beast the term which —
Simone Weil, surely among the most compassionate of women,
—
applied to society and to treat with contempt the opinions which,
in its impersonal stupidity, it strives to thrust upon us.
It is strange that in a supposedly cynical age the exponents of
the current morality which, at this particular moment in time, has
to do with 'social justice' and 'equality', should be as self-righteous
as any seventeenth-century puritan or nineteenth-century mis-
sionary. One might have expected them to be more self-critical.
And the new Puritanism readily adopts the jargon of the old one ;

differences in wealth are 'obscene', the notion that some people

might be better than others is 'indecent' and so on. No Calvinistic
deity speaks here, but only an historical trend which seeks to
express itself through a multiplicity of masks, seldom showing its
raw face. Those who serve it do not know it and their innocence
;

serves its purpose very well. A rogue who consciously deceives

the people and deliberately leads them up the wrong road cannot
go far in politics. A man must believe in himself if he is to be
believed, and he must be convinced if he is to convince. Above all
he must be at one with the obscure yet powerful currents of opinion
which sway men's minds and hearts when they have lost faith in an
absolute and changeless Principle from which, in the ages of faith,
all opinions flowed.
The beliefs which now hold sway could have appeal were
little

it not for an emptiness that demands to be filled and an ignorance

which cries out to be assuaged by certainties, however absurd.
Men need to know. If true knowledge is denied them, they will
seize upon error and make it their knowledge but this can only;

happen to those who, being unacquainted with truth at the mun-

dane level of wind and weather, have little hope of acquaintance
with truth at any more exalted level. The veils which hide from
them the normal realities of human living hide much else besides,
for such veils not only protect but also exclude : they enclose us
within a dream world in which folly may be wisdom and falsehood
may be truth, and no one can tell the difference —for the bright
33
 KING OF THE CASTLE
light by which he might discern it is shut out. What will such
vulnerable creatures do when they are cast out into the open like
pet animals left to fend for themselves ? They are not equipped to
face reality in any shape or form. And yet the structure which for
the moment protects them against the forces of nature as it does
against the results of their own folly or improvidence is very frail

and may already be threatened with destruction. Its existence is a

by-product of a period of unprecedented wealth and prosperity in
the so-called 'developed' countries. We must wait to see how the
compassionate society behaves when it is no longer the fat society.
Sadly but, perhaps, not altogether unexpectedly this society
has had very limited success in achieving what is supposed to be
the justification for its existence —the greatest amount of happiness
for the greatest possible number of people. In so far as its citizens
are saved from the major anxieties and responsibilities which
normally surround the business of being a man, they transfer
what appears to be an unvarying human capacity for worry to the
most trivial things, making mountains out of molehills on a vast
scale and they have 'nervous breakdowns' over problems v/hich
;

men and women living under sterner conditions would hardly

find time to notice.
It is revealing that so many people in Britain and the U.S. who
are old enough to have been involved in the Second World War
look back upon that time of trial and danger as the 'happiest time
of their lives'. But happiness is an elusive quality, not easily im-
posed through legislation, and human beings have a way of be-
having like a contrary child who squats in the midst of a pile of
Christmas presents wailing that the one thing he really wanted is
missing. This is profoundly discouraging for those whose only
desire is to please, yet they are not easily put down. In imperial
times the Anglo-Saxons made by far the most determined and
uncompromising missionaries, and the missionary spirit endures
(particularly in left-wing circles) but is now turned inwards upon
our own societies. The new morality or the new 'normality' is
imposed in the same earnest and self-righteous spirit which ani-
mated those intrepid exponents of the less orthodox sub-cults
of Christianity when they confronted the naked heathen and told
him what was good for him. Only the tropical topee has been
discarded.
The man who, in spite of these pressures, has difficulty in

34
 UNREAL CITIES
accepting what his mentors regard as self-evident and fails to
conform to the 'normality' in fashion at this particular moment, is

clearly a case for treatment. When we criticise the Soviet authori-

ties for confining their dissidents in mental hospitals we tend to
forget that, for them, anyone who does not conform to 'socialist

morality' isindeed less than sane. Simone Weil's 'Great Beast' has
become a god denied only by madmen, and to be 'anti-social' is to
be out of touch with reality. In the West 'gradualism' takes the
place of revolution and the issues are therefore less clear-cut but ;

we are travelling in the same direction and psychiatry already plays

itspart in encouraging conformity.
In theory the psychiatrist conceives his job as one of helping
people to live as happily as may be possible in the world in which
they find themselves, without making moral judgments any more
than the motor mechanic concerns himself with the direction
in which a car will be driven after he has made it roadworthy.
Unfortunately the human situation does not permit us to take up
positions of neutrality. Psychiatrists are men, with an ineradicable
tendency to see human actions in a moral context, and their clients
also are men, not motor cars. The difference cannot be ignored,
for cars do not choose their direction whereas men —
at least in a
partial and limited sense do. —
The question which the psychiatrist tries at all costs to avoid
answering is whether men should be persuaded to adjust to a bad
society or to a society on the way to self-destruction. To answer
it would be to make value-judgments which most psychiatrists

are determined to exclude from their work, although the very

notion that this can be done betrays a singular ignorance of human
nature.
Which, in fact, do we admire the slave who adjusts to his posi-
:

tion and is happy in slavery, or the slave who escapes and becomes
a free man? Most people would favour the escaper, but the psy-
chiatrist is dedicated to combating tendencies to 'escapism',
whatever form they may take, and to counsel adjustment to the
circumstances of our time simply because these circumstances
exist, rather as though a man in the path of an avalanche were
advised to adjust to his situation —which certainly exists —and
allow himself to be engulfed, since to get out of the way would
be an act of 'escapism'. To those who have no belief in principles
situated outside the realm of ceaseless change, reality appears to

35
 KING OF THE CASTLE
be neither more nor less than what happens to exist at a given
moment and what exists at this moment is all that there is. The
notion that there may be degrees of reality is quite alien to this
mentality, although the fact that waking life is more real than
dreaming or that hallucinations differ from the clear vision of
objects is not denied.

People easily mistake for courage and realism attitudes which

are, in truth, their opposites and, because a calamity cannot be
prevented, call it a benefit and make a virtue of their inability to
escape from it. Realism would require quite a different approach,
for it implies discrimination and valuation. At the simplest level
we know well enough the difference between what is pleasant
and what is and the fact that we may have to endure the
painful,
latter does not prevent us from recognising it for what it is. To
refuse to recognise those features of the modern world which are
clearly evil, ugly and destructive of the qualities which constitute
the nobility of the human state, simply because they exist and we
do not know what to do about them, is to compound the injuries
we suffer by allowing our innate capacity for judgment to be
falsified.
The major problem, however, which faces those who would
like to ensure that their fabricated system is proof against all

incursions of reality concerns emotional distress. In the first place,

swift change is extremely uncomfortable and unsettling : required

to readjust every few years
major changes in their environment,
to
many people become depressed and forget to smile. Secondly, we
are all of us exposed to grief the people we love die, as we shall
:

ourselves in due course expectations are disappointed and ambi-

;

tions are thwarted by circumstance. Finally, there are some who

v insist upon feeling guilty over the ill they have done or simply on
account of the ugliness which they perceive in their own souls.
A solution of a kind has been found to this problem in the form of
sedatives and anti-depressant drugs, so that many human ex-
periences which used to be accepted as an integral part of human
life are now defined and dealt with as medical problems. The

widow who grieves for a beloved husband becomes a 'case', as does

the man saddened by the recollection of the napalm or high
explosives he has dropped on civilian populations. One had
thought that guilt was a way, however indirect, in which we might
perceive the nature of reality and the laws which govern our human

36
 UNREAL CITIES
experience but it is now an illness that can be cured.
;

Death, however, remains incurable. Though we might be

embarrassed by Victorian death-bed scenes or the practices of
mourning among people less sophisticated than ourselves, the fact
of death tells us so much
about the realities of our condition that to
ignore it or try to forget it is to be unaware of the most important
thing we need to know about our situation as living creatures.
Equally, to witness and participate in the dying of our fellow men
and women is to learn what we are and, if we have any wisdom
at all, to draw conclusions which must in their way affect our every
thought and our every act. It was with good reason that Walid I,
one of the Umayyad Caliphs, wore always on his finger a ring
inscribed 'Walid, thou must die'. /

We cannot begin to consider what we are or what we should

do until we know in heart and mind and body that we are mortal
and that death walks with us from the moment we are born. It
is not only in Islam that the wise man lies down each night knowing

that he may not awaken and greets each new day in the knowledge
that he may not see its ending. But those who live in this awareness
find in their days a savour that is missed by all who hide themselves
away from it. They know, as these others do not, what it is to be a
man.
We are witnessing now an attempt to eliminate the darker, more
painful aspects of human no longer by rising above them
living,
(and thereby gaining in stature), but either by abolishing them
which is impossible since they lie in the nature of things or by —
pretending they do not exist. It was possible for the men of other
times to accept these conditions because life as such was situated
in an infinitely wider context. They knew that however deeply
involved they might be in the scenario of suffering and loss, they
were not by nature totally submerged in it. Experience taught
them to look elsewhere for peace and for perfection, and faith
assured them that there are indeed other dimensions than those
which seem to hem us in. Today most people are confined in a
place that knows no 'elsewhere', trapped with wild beasts that
tear their flesh and from which they cannot escape. It is hardly
surprising that they need to be drugged to be able to exist in such
a situation.
This has inevitably drawn us into a vicious circle. The more
we try to insulate ourselves, however temporarily, against the

37
 KING OF THE CASTLE
harsh realities of the human condition, the more unreal our world
becomes and the further it is removed from all contact with Truth.
—
The awareness of other dimensions an awareness through which
—
we might achieve freedom becomes inaccessible there is no ;

place for God in an artificial world since it is realities that point

towards him and remind us of him, not fictions and the idea that ;

—
anything good any joy or reconciliation or any light is to be —
found outside the bubble in which we live is inconceivable. We
can imagine only darkness and a fearful emptiness, black as inter-
stellar space we hide our faces from it and wait to die.
:

When a man is mad we say that he has 'lost contact with reality',
which is a fair enough though it leaves room for con-
definition
siderable differences of opinion as to what we mean by 'reality'.
Not every psychiatrist, however, defines sanity in terms of adjust-
ment to a given, uncritically accepted situation. In his study of
human behaviour in the Nazi concentration camps,* Bruno
Bettelheim (himself a survivor of the camps) writes of the common
tendency to deny that any basic problem exists in connection with
the increasing mechanisation of the human condition. 'Like the
person suffering from addiction', he says, 'our society seems to be
rushing ahead unthinking into an ever greater mechanisation of
life, expecting more extensive technology to solve the problems

it creates. Here we operate like the alcoholic who tries to escape

from his hangover by going on a new binge.'

'Modern man', he adds, 'suffers from his inability to make a
choice, as he sees it, between renouncing freedom and indivi-
dualism, or giving up the material comforts of technology This, . . .

as I see it, is the true conflict of our times.'

This, of course, assumes an awareness of the possibility of
choosing. The speed with which we are being carried onwards in
our express train, the blurring of outlines in our changing en-
vironment and the fatalism with which people are encouraged
to accept these conditions makes it difficult to see that a choice
There is, in any case, a common human
exists or has ever existed.
tendency, more pronounced in our time than ever before, to
believe that one can 'have one's cake and eat it'. This belief is
encouraged by evolutionary theory and by the bastard notion it
has begotten on wishful thinking the concept of progress. It is
:

* The Informed Heart: Bruno Bettelheim.

38
 UNREAL CITIES
readily assumed that the modern world comforts,
benefits of the —
material prosperity, from many natural disasters,
protection
'richness' —
of human experience and so on accrue to us in the way
that certain advantages accrue to a man or woman when they reach
adult status.
Among the worst of the many misleading lessons drummed
into our children at school, where the hypotheses of contemporary
science are presented as though they were unquestionable facts, is
the flattering fiction that our age represents the 'grown up' condi-
tion of mankind. Picture books show our hairy ancestors dis-
covering fire, our childlike but promising predecessors inventing
primitive machines and ourselves, both wise and clever, travelling
at breathtakingspeed and reaching out towards a heaven on earth.
Implied (but not illustrated, for this would be tactless) is an image
of Western man bearing gifts of knowledge and civilisation to
those less fortunate than himself.
Inventiveness has become the touchstone both of intelligence
and of excellence, and qualities peculiar to one particular human
group at a particular moment in history are seen as the qualities
proper to man in his 'evolved' form. The fact that such one-
sidedness is developed only at immense cost and through the
sacrifice of many of the qualities which were once thought to mark
the real distinction between men and beasts is ignored. And yet
the human situation does not really change. Man is still man,
compelled to choose between this good thing and that one, never
allowed to enjoy both together. To possess one he must, in the
long run, sacrifice another ;
and, for that matter, to possess some
worthless trifle he may be called upon to give up such valuables
as he has inherited, buying fantasies at the cost of reality and
paying in sound coinage for trash. What the world can offer us
is limited by its very nature, and we must decide what we want to
have from it. nothing to suggest that men have succeeded,
There is

in this age, in escaping from these laws of compensation.

We need, then, to be shrewd and canny merchants, choosing
with care what we buy and sell, constantly on guard against those
who us something for nothing, and parting with our goods
offer
only when we see the colour of the purchaser's money. To a man
such as Bettelheim after his prison experience, the true nature of
liberty must have been transparently clear such men will not ;

give up the smallest particle of their liberty unless the value of

39
 KING OF THE CASTLE
what they are offered in return has been certified beyond all possible
doubt, nor will they readily sacrifice their freedom of choice even
in the smallest matters.
The theory upon which contemporary societies operate is that
we must have complete freedom to make the right choice. We are
to be prevented, so far as may be possible, from making the wrong
one, not only because this would be bad for us but because it
would very probably injure other people as well. Unfortunately
many of us do insist upon choosing wrongly all too often, and our
benefactors feel obliged, in the public interest, to narrow the field
of choice and restrict our opportunities for making mistakes. In
J this fashion the trap
closes, not with a sudden snap which might
provoke a violent struggle to escape, but inch-by-inch year-by-
year.
It would be foolish to suggest that the alternatives to letting
the trap close upon us are pleasant or palatable. Our situation
invites us to make a choice of evils, not a choice between black
and white. The beliefs which must be questioned in any radical
criticism of the modern age are beliefs which have led, among
other things, to advances in medical practice, the elimination of
hardship in many areas of human activity and a quantitatively
richer than was ever before possible. The fact that this century
life

has also provided examples of cruelty and mass slaughter on an

unprecedented scale is generally considered irrelevant, for these
things are regarded as accidents which, with a reasonable amount
of luck, we shall avoid in future. The critic is therefore open to
attack on the grounds that he would like to see half the babies
born dying in infancy and the majority of those who survive
being denied most of the joys of life.
The question of what we would or would not like has very little

to do with the issue. We would always like to enjoy the best of all

possible worlds, or to be more honest, the best of all impossible

worlds ; but we are bound to the wheel of fact, of what exists and
of what is practicable. Those who reach out avidly to grasp the
impossible find that they have lost what little they had that was
good and solid. At the end of the day they hold only fantasies in
their hands fantasies which,
; like parasites, destroy their host.
It is also quite common to ask the critic if he wants to see 'the
clock put back', as though the process of time could be reversed
or an old man become young again. We must learn from the past

40
 UNREAL CITIES
but we cannot return toand patterns of living or social systems
it,

which have had their day are done with and cannot be brought
back but they may still provide a touchstone, and without such
;

touchstones, such indications of the human path, we are no more

than children lost in the wilds. The putting-the-clock-back argu-
ment is, in any case, a prime example of the modern tendency to
dismiss as pointless any criticism which is not accompanied by an
instant remedy. Yet a building with unsound foundations will fall,
regardless of whether the builders are ready to put up another in
its place, and in their personal lives people are still allowed to

recognise that a wrong decision was made and to regret the fact,
even when the decision cannot be reversed.
For countless generations in that past from which, if we were
less arrogant, we could learn so much that we need to know before
it is too late, men lived and died with a picture of themselves

and of their world which seemed as real and as immutable as the

physical environment itself. The picture varied in detail from
place to place, just as human languages and styles vary from one
people to another, but in its basic substance it was a single, uni-
versal image and the variations fade into insignificance when
comparison is made with our contemporary view of things. To
most people in the West today and to an increasing number in
every part of the world, this image appears to be false since it seems
to have no foundation in physical observation and experiment.
We should consider what is implied in the assumption that we
are right and everyone else was wrong. If the vast majority of
human beings of every race, from the beginning of time until
yesterday or the day before, were mistaken in their most funda-
mental beliefs and lived out their lives in error and illusion, then
it is utterly unreasonable to suppose that human beings could

now or ever be right. The notion that, after such ages of ignorance
and superstition, this silly creature has suddenly become wise is
too improbable to be entertained 'for a being absurd by nature',
;

as Frithjof Schuon has said, 'does not contain the possibility of

ceasing to be absurd'. With every word that casts derision upon
the traditional beliefs of mankind we dig away the ground from
under our own feet and disqualify ourselves from making true
judgments in any field. We are the same men they were, with no
sixth sense or special power of intelligence over and above what
they possessed.

4i
 KING OF THE CASTLE
There are indeed some who, taking this point, maintain either
that there is no truth to be known or else that such truth as there

may be is for ever beyond man's reach he must therefore be

:

—
content with the one thing he knows for certain the fact of his
own subjective experience. There can be no more total abdication
of human intelligence. These philosophers have found a sub-
terranean place where no thunder can shake them, no lightning
dazzle them, and it is sometimes suggested that God himself will
respect their dreadful privacy and leave them for ever alone. And
yet we possess, as human beings, an inborn conviction that we are
capable of true knowledge and that the possibility of being ob-
jectively right exists. We have, in fact, a sense of the Absolute.
The denial of this capacity shakes and uproots us ; it threatens to
isolate us in an absurd realm of weightless fantasies with which we
—
cannot hope to grapple for they are not really there at all.
In this way, as also by the environment we have built around
ourselves and by the work we do, we are unmanned and made
ready for enslavement. For every prey there is a predator, and ours

may be closer than we know.

 THE COST OF WEALTH

According to a Muslim story Jesus, son of Mary, came once upon

an old man who lived on a mountain in the open air, without
any shelter from heat or cold. Jesus asked him why he had not
built himself a house. 'Oh Spirit of God,' said the old man,
'Prophets before thee predicted that I would live for only seven
hundred years. It is not worth my trouble to settle down.'
Those who expect to live an even shorter span may well hesitate
to set up house here and we are assured in the wise doctrines
;

handed down to us that the world is to be treated as a bridge, not

as a stopping place. 'I am like a rider who shelters under a tree,
then goes on his way,' said the Prophet Muhammad. But to be,
in this sense, a traveller or one who
lives unconfined is not at all
the same thing vagabond. Those who are not
as being a rootless
firmly established in heaven must at least have their feet firmly
planted on earth for we are, through our earthly nature, embedded
;

in its matrix, dust of its dust. Its minerals run in our veins and
its natural forces play within us as they do in the world beyond

the skin's thin membrane.

A man stands firm if his roots are well sunk in one place (whether
we understand this literally or in a deeper sense), his own par-
ticular location, his property, his home. These things are like
extensions of his own body ;
stripped of them he is a tortoise
without its shell —
a flayed, pulpy creature, and a ready prey for the
predators. To
suppose otherwise is to be deceived by the false
idealism which preaches that men can be freed through violent
revolution and liberated from their embeddedness by a simple
uprooting, rather than through a transfiguration which encom-
passes both man and matrix. When, allegedly in the interests of a
wider and richer life for all, we deprive men of the private and
limited field within which they can effectively exercise their powers
of choice and understand their responsibilities, we produce, not a

43
 KING OF THE CASXLE
liberated being, but a naked creature. There are reformers who,
like wise doctors, labour to keep us in health
but there exists also a
;

malignant passion for change which readily sacrifices the real

goods we possess to ideals which are both unrealisable on the level
of human living and unrelated to the actual needs of real men and
women.
From the time of the French Encyclopaedists onwards our
daily life has been increasingly at the mercy of theorists who, in
their quiet studies or in university libraries, have let their thoughts
and run free, intoxicated often enough by a passion
their fantasies
for abstract good and abstract right, convinced that the distant
world of people and of things can be transformed into something
closer to their dreams. Behind the dry exterior and behind the
equation which seems to offer a solution to complex human prob-
lems is a flood of strangely rarefied emotion which requires no
human contact for its satisfaction. Such men often go unrecog-
nised in their lifetimes, but the moment comes when a spark from
their secret passion lights on tinder. Young minds take fire, lost
men find a direction and the masses begin to stir. Once we have
lost contact with the true source of answers which appease the
questioning mind, a theory which appears to provide answers and
a basis for action is like a draught of cool water in the desert, and
there remain no touchstones in terms of which it might: be assessed
objectively.
Put into practice, these passionate theoriescome up against the
obtuseness of human material dreams of universal justice are
:

obstructed by flesh and blood, and 'people' (an easily manageable ^

abstraction in the mind of the theorist) block the way of progress ; r

soon there are real bodies in the street and real blood stains the
pavements.
But change need not always be so abrupt. There are more
subtle ways of removing obstructions and gentler techniques of
man-management. Why destroy a man if, with patience, he can be
persuaded to destroy himself? And when this patient persuasion
appeals to a moral sense that is all at sea, having been cut adrift
from the very notion of an immutable Good which is never bent
to human convenience, its effectiveness is not in doubt.
In the long run all private goods present themselves as obstacles
in the way of change and in the way of the forces which, though
they operate in the shadows, direct the course of change but ;

44
 THE COST OF WEALTH
without some corner of his environment, however small, that be-
longs to him a man is as easily tipped over as a ninepin. Belongings
take up space and restrict mobility, like hillocks dotting the flat
surface of a map upon which wecould otherwise draw straight
houses which prevent a 'developer' from realising
lines or like little
his grand design for a site on which all else has been demolished.
The pride of industrialism in its early stages was the railway,
ideally a straight line ruled across the map, but at that time tech-
nical problems made it impossible completely to ignore the natural
features of the landscape, while social conditions forced the plan-
ners to take into consideration private interests —the great estates
owned by men so well entrenched that they could insist upon a
diversion around their property. The contemporary world how-
ever insists upon straight lines, whether on the social, economic
or political level. Technology enables us to iron out the natural
obstacles, and ideology justifies the elimination of man-made
obstructions.
The railways were the precursors of what was to come. Modern
techniques of government, like the industrial techniques which
increasingly determine them, go straight to the point. Required to
twist and turn around islands of individual idiosyncrasy or to
respect vested interests and entrenched positions, they could not
function at all. But to deprive men of their idiosyncratic indivi-
dualism, of their vested interests, however small, and of their
entrenchment in a given milieu is to uproot them. Only then can
they be marshalled into files, and only so can their general interest

and their general usefulness be reckoned statistically.

In the economic realm, which is in itself a kind of abstraction
of man's earthliness, uprooting takes the form of the substitution
of public wealth for private property. These are of entirely dif-
ferent natures, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out in her remark-
able study of the subject.* 'The present emergence everywhere of
actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same
time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single
individual consists of his share in the annual income of society
as a whole, clearly shows how little these two are connected. Prior
to the modern age, which began with the expropriation of the poor
and then proceeded to emancipate the new propertyless classes, all

* The Human Condition: Hannah Arendt (University of Chicago

Press), p. 61.
 KING OF THE CASTLE
civilisationshave rested upon the sacredness of private property.
Wealth, on the contrary, whether privately owned or publicly
distributed, had never been sacred before. Originally property
meant no more or less than to have one's location in a particular
part of the world . .

Property, as Miss Arendt understands it, is not simply a par-

ticular form of acquired wealth but a protective and familiar shell,
so assimilated to its owner that it can scarcely be thought of as
disposable. To sell it would be comparable to selling oneself, to
have it seized in payment of taxation would be comparable to
mutilation (hence, no doubt, the age-old loathing for tax-gatherers).
A house, a plot of land or durable goods which can be handed down
from generation to generation are qualitatively different from a
car or a television set which soon become obsolete.
It is this durability in the personal environment that enables
men to see their own short and changeful lives against a back-
ground of relative permanence and, in doing so, to achieve a
stability which may be the foundation of greater and more trans-
cendent achievements. The man who is born and dies in the same
bed has lived in a context in which he could sink roots and from
which he could draw nourishment. He moved, perhaps he travelled
far, but his environment could be relied upon to stay still and ;

movement should be a quality of men, not of environments.

Understood in this sense, property is something handed on
from generation to generation. The modern mind, conditioned as
it is to the devouring needs of a fast-changing world and reflecting

these needs even in its moral judgments, is disturbed by the very

idea of inheritance. It is not only socialists who believe that
everyone should start out stripped of inherited advantages and
make his way, win his wealth (in capitalist terms) or his position
(in the socialist context) by his own efforts. This might be splendid
if life in the human community were no more than a glorified
School Sports Day, but our race is run through a forest in which
—
wild beasts abound and even more dangerous creatures. If all
cannot take part armed, then at least let some carry weapons of
defence. It is even possible that those who are armed may offer
some protection to those who are not. If ten men face a host of
enemies and only one has a gun, who would ask him to throw it
away in the interests of fairness and equality? Those who are
fortunate enough to live under a benevolent government and see

46
 THE COST OF WEALTH
no danger in placing themselves trustingly in its hands can know
little of the world and still less of history if they imagine that this

happy state of affairs is in some way guaranteed to endure in-

definitely.
Miss Arendt points out that the modern age began with the
expropriation of the small man or, in other words, with the
creation of a proletariat fitted to the requirements of a machine
civilisation. It was with good reason that Marx told the workers
they had nothing to lose but their chains. It would be wrong
however to suppose that such a dispossessed class has always
existed, in Europe or elsewhere ; the only historical parallel is

probably with chattel slavery. The dispossessed must always

represent an element of grave danger for any society, precisely
because they have nothing to lose. Take from a man the little he
has that is own, his 'locality', and make a slave of him as
truly his
men were enslaved by developing industrialism then take note ;

of his condition, raise him up and give him a fair share of the
wealth created by his labour he is now 'better off, he may well be
:

happier but he no longer knows what it means to possess property

and he is so effectively integrated into the social machine that he
will never obstruct its course, no matter which way that course
may lead.
The process of expropriation however may very well start at
the other end of the social scale. Attack the big man first —small
men, having their normal quota of envy, will be delighted to see
him put down. Once the big man has been incapacitated, the small
ones can be mopped up easily enough. In the matter of property
(and of inheritance) we are sure to hang separately if we do not
hang together and in troubled times the small man's cottage is
;

indefensible once the big man's castle has fallen. The castle, after
all, was not merely the local magnate's home it was also the refuge,
;

in changing and turbulent times, for all the neighbourhood.

The distinction between the dispossessed and those who are
free of possessions —
opposites which may superficially resemble
—
each other must again be stressed to avoid any possible mis-
understanding. The saint is essentially a man stripped and naked
in this world, but he is one who no longer needs to draw strength
and sustenance from earthly roots he is supplied with these in
;

quite another way and from quite another source. The ordinary
man's potential for sanctity is too deeply buried to be wrenched

47
 KING OF THE CASTLE
to the surface by the brutal technique of cutting off his earthly
attachments. He
needs his private plot and, however paradoxical
this may seem, is unlikely to rise above it if he is deprived prema-
turely of this support a caterpillar will not become a butterfly if
;

it is denied its chrysalis stage.

This something completely ignored by the cruel and unrealistic
is

'idealism' of our theorists. There is no limit to the risks they are

prepared to take with human souls, and in this age of psychology
and 'psychologising' one finds a quite astonishing ignorance of
human nature and human needs. If men as they really are do not
fit the categories of post-Christian morality, then they must adapt

themselves or perish. On the same principle one might fling a

group of children who have never learned to swim into deep
water. Some, no doubt, will swim the rest will drown.
;

The propertyless state is for saints or brigands, homelessness

for the wandering friar or the tramp. The majority of people
need to find some repose in the things around them if they are
to avoid a kind of inward dissolution in the time-stream and we
;

need this more urgently today than at any time in the past because
we live in a machine civilisation, and machines, in the regularity of
their movement, have something of the character of clocks which
impose the laws of mechanical time upon the human mind as well
as the human body.
But we also need to find more than repose and stability in our
—
environment if we are to be nourished by it nourished, that is,
as whole men and not simply as bodies in motion. We need to
discover meaning in it, a meaning not easily exhausted and into
which shafts can be sunk. This is lacking in fabricated environ-
ments, unless the fabrications in question are works of inspired
beauty upon which love and wisdom as well as skill and sweat
have been lavished. It is profoundly unhealthy for men to live
always among the products of their own minds and their own
labour, for this is in essence a second-hand environment and is not
sufficiently worthy of their attention to prevent them from with-
drawing into private or, for that matter, collective fantasy their
;

contact with reality is attenuated, and without this contact no

— —
creature can survive or deserves to survive either physically or
spiritually.
Such environments have been compared to stage sets, and upon
them the most improbable and irrelevant dramas may be acted

48
 THE COST OF WEALTH
out. A time comes when error alone seems plausible and truth
would be teddy
as out of place as a live animal in a gathering of
bears. Our such stage sets, engineered rather than
cities are just

built and, in spite of their appearance of massive solidity (or, from

another point of view, because of it), constantly changing in the
process of demolition and reconstruction. They offer only geo-
metrical patterns to the eye and, since nothing in visible nature,
except the crystal, is perfectly symmetrical, these patterns intensify
the sense of artificiality. The laws of geometry stand opposed to

I
the laws governing living organisms and provide, when rigidly
applied to the human environment, a Procrustean bed which can
provide no rest or refreshment. Moreover the geometrical en-
I

vironment, by its nature, lays claim to a kind of perfection —

quantitative perfection (every angle, every measurement being
mathematically exact) —
that is at odds with our earthly context
in which nothing is final, finished or perfected but it accords ;

only too well with the false perfectionism which is so readily

applied to the organisation of human societies and with an idealism
which insists upon fitting humankind into symmetrical patterns.
These cities are fitting barracks for workers whose metabolism,
mental as well as physical, must be adjusted to the requirements of
the machine. The man who lives in a natural environment has a
fair chance of reaching out to something beyond nature but he ;

who lives in an artificial one has done well if he succeeds simply

in remaining human. To do so the worker at a conveyor belt in a
vast modern factory needs to possess the kind of strength and
heroism which, in another place, might have carried him to
sanctity.
A mechanised world, says Frithjof Schuon, is particularly
impermeable to spiritual realities Tt requires machinery and
:

therefore metal, din, hidden and treacherous forces, a nightmare

environment, incomprehensible comings and goings in a word, —
an insect-like existence carried on in the midst of ugliness and
triviality .When the industrial worker says he has no time to
. .

pray he is not far wrong, for in this way he is merely expressing

what is inhuman or, one might say, subhuman in his condition.'*
Meanwhile, if some spark of the desire to understand survives in
the midst of this din he is offered, not such truths as might satisfy
the whole man, but empty abstractions and the unbeliever's thin gruel.
* Language of the Self: Frithjof Schuon, pp. 153-4.

49
 KING OF THE CASTLE
An environment of abstractions and 'incomprehensible comings
and goings' offers nothing to satisfy man's need to find meaning
in his daily life. To starve this need was one of the most effective
techniques of demoralisation employed in the Nazi camps. Sense-
less tasks, a hideous environment, cruelties that seemed unrelated
to the known laws of causality— these were the means employed to
construct a world not only of pain and humiliation but also of
non-sense. Torture and punishment no longer bore any logical
relation to the persons upon whom they were inflicted. If a work
gang showed signs of rebellion, the most docile member of the
gang was as likely to be shot as any other. If a flogging had been
ordered, it did not matter who was flogged all were interchangeable
;

units and the very term 'punishment' became meaningless, unless

one wishes to think in terms of a faceless mankind punishing itself.
In keeping the camp records it was found simpler to correct
errors on human beings than in the books.* If the number of men,
women and children in a new intake failed to tally with the figure
shown in the records, then some were killed or more were arrested
according to whether the figure was too low or too high. Nothing
personal was involved. The organisational machine functioned
in accordance with the law of simplicity which governs such
operations. And yet the motives behind all this might be traced to
certain personal roots, for those who contrived the system had
fallen from the human level into the lower reaches of natural pro-
cess, where the light of sense no longer penetrates. Our age is pain-
fully aware of the 'blind' side of nature jungle proliferation, the
:

riverbed solid with catfish waiting for the sewage that will give
them the strength to wait for more sewage, the busy ants and all the
business of 'eating and being eaten'. Since man as microcosm
contains within himself all that is or can be, the dark shadow of
natural process must sometimes fall across our hearts and our
minds. There is, in consequence, a kind of satisfaction for certain
despairing souls in bringing others to a like state and in reducing
—
proud men to their own level. Already in hell, abandoned so it
—
seems to them by the light they have themselves abandoned, they
still seek confirmation that there is nowhere else to be.

Those who undertake to destroy, if they can, the imprint of

God, there where it seems to offer itself most vulnerably to their
* Bettelheim, op. cit. p. 245.

50
 THE COST OF WEALTH
hands and their instruments, that is to say in the human form,
find their task made easier if their victim is already dispossessed,
an 'ordinary' man.
a unit in the multitude,
Within the earthly framework men have sought to assuage the
sense of their own mortality and to build fixed islands in the
stream of natural process by producing objects more enduring
than themselves ;
but, since this is not mere beavers' labour, the
aim has generally been to create objects which reflect at least some
glint of an eternal light and so recall, however crudely, an unchang-
ing order in the midst of ceaseless change. This is why the posses-
sions of 'primitive' peoples almost invariably have a sacred charac-
ter, their very construction being accompanied by rituals which

relate them to their heavenly archetypes. Men's labour and their

rest then take place, not in the context of natural process, but in
the midst of fragments fallen, as it were, from heaven ; and these
fragments —tattered as they may be —are handed down from father
to son, preserving continuity and reminding those who handle
them that men are not entirely submerged in time and not wholly
subject to its destructive course. Seeing this made plain in their
outwardness, in the furniture of their brief lives, they may the
more readily perceive elements in themselves above which are set
the flood and which indicate the mark of eternity implanted in
their hearts, that Kingdom of Heaven which, Christ said, is
'within you'. Such men are not easily moved by the fickle currents
of theory and fashion.
The products of industrial civilisation are more ephemeral
than ourselves. We outlive our products. The furniture of our
homes be out of fashion in a decade or less if it does not come
will
to pieces even sooner, and the time is approaching when our
houses themselves will be less enduring than we are. These things
no longer provide an anchor on the contrary, they carry us along
;

with them in the rushing stream. And the ephemeral character of

all our works is underlined by the fact that we cannot visualise the

—
shape of the world in which our children let alone our grand-
children — will live. Troubled by the possibility of nuclear destruc-
tion and dizzied by the pace of technological change, many would
hardly dare to visualise it, but we cannot doubt that it will bear

little resemblance to the context that is now our home and be- ;

cause men's characters and outlook are so closely linked to their

environment, we are cut off even from the bond of kinship with

5*
 KING OF THE CASTLE
those who will come after us. We can be sure only that they will be
different and we would not know what to say to them.
It is forgotten however that swift change is a characteristic of

/ decay, not of growth, and that the body which took some eighteen
years to come to maturity dissolves into its constituent chemicals
I"
in a far shorter time. P k, ov 1t

Now, when we tend to think of ourselves as in some measure

emancipated from nature and shielded from it by the man-made
structures of civilisation, men are absorbed as never before into
patterns reminiscent of natural process rather than of human
living, occupied almost exclusively with the quantitative and the
repetitious. In a certain sense one might claim that the Australian
aboriginal, trekking from one water-hole to the next, is more
independent of natural process and more distinctively a man than
the modern factory worker, for he is on a purposeful journey.
There are no such journeys for the factory worker, whose labour
is no more than the constant repetition of essentially meaningless

actions and who moves to and fro between his living quarters and
his place of work like a shuttle on a loom.
In a world of intensive production and equally intensive con-
sumption we have begun to imitate the wastefulness of what are
usually called the 'lower forms of nature', that is to say those
aspects of nature which are most impenetrable to intelligence.
While men were still parsimonious they stood out in sharp relief
from this process and what they drew out of the river of change
for their own use crystallised around them into a condition of
relative durability. Now things pour from the machines much as
tropical vegetation proliferates and, as soon as they emerge, they
are used up and returned into the cyclic process. In man's bio-
logical functions there is just such a pattern of regularity and
repetition but, as man, it is his nature to go his unique way,
;

striding over the wave-pattern of biological life towards a goal

which infinitely transcends this pattern. To condemn him to the
repetitious production of objects which have no intrinsic value,
ministering not to real needs but to an insatiable greed for con-
sumer goods, is to condemn him to futility.
'We must consume, devour as it were, our houses and furniture
and cars as though they were the "good things" of nature, which
spoil uselessly if they are not drawn into the never-ending cycle
of man's metabolism with nature. It is as though we had forced

52
 THE COST OF WEALTH
open the distinguishing boundaries which protect the world, the
—
human artifice, from nature the biological process which goes
on in its very midst as well as the natural cyclical processes which
—
surround it delivering and abandoning to them the always
threatened stability of a human world.'*
important in this context to understand that 'nature' is the
It is r

mother of ambiguity on the one hand, it reflects a light which

:

far transcends it and shaped into signs and symbols which

is

indicate the realities inherent in that light on the other, in so far

;

as it is unreflective, it may be compared to a swirling darkness which

dissolves both men and things into dust.
The 'artifice' of which Miss Arendt speaks is therefore nature
ennobled by form and by the operations of intelligence, contrasted
with the destructive and senseless aspect of natural process. There
is an obvious significance in the fact that social wealth, unlike

private property, thrives upon destruction. Two great world wars

which wiped from the face of Europe so much that was 'obsoles-
cent' and gave a new impetus to technology led within a few years
to vast increases of public wealth. Stability, on the other hand,
and the conservation of property slow the machine down.
If momentum is to be maintained —
and we may already have
reached a point at which the whole structure will collapse if it is
—
not maintained everything must be grist to the mill. 'Both the
concentration camps and the death camps and what happened —
in them — were an application beyond reason of the concept of
labour as a commodity,' says Bettelheim 'In the camps, not only ;

human labour but the total person became commodity.'! But such
concepts are bound, sooner or later, to be 'applied beyond reason'
in the kind of world we now inhabit and once the human person
;

—
becomes 'commodity', responsibility if it can still be said to
—
exist adheres only to impersonal forces, to the great wind which
sweeps the earth, flattening everything in its path into uniformity,
reducing it to dust. Though the wind is not to blame.
Meanwhile, men hug small things to themselves protectively
—protecting the thing, but also protecting themselves. There is a
special pathos in theimage of the old peasant who keeps his life's
savings under his mattress. He distrusts the banks, for he senses

* Hannah Arendt, op. cit. p. 126.

f Bettelheim, op. cit. p. 243.

53
 KING OF THE CASTLE
behind them the marauding forces which would snatch his frag-
ments of stability from him. He refuses to cast back into the flux
in this case, his country's economy —
the little he has won from it.
He is an enemy of society, for he does not understand that what he
earned was not really meant to be 'his' it was only loaned to him
;

as 'purchasing power'. Above all he was led to believe that the

printed notes or metal coins which came his way represented
value. Being human and therefore the heir to a certain knowledge,
a certain sense of order which cannot be totally eradicated, he
associated the concept of value with something stable, something
to which one might hold fast in shifting sands he imagined that
;

the value of his currency would endure. No one had explained to

him that it was nothing more than a ticket with which to purchase
consumer goods and that if he tried to hold onto it he would find,
not gold, but worthless paper in his grasp for the process of
;

inflation is a most effective means of dissolving all fixed islands in

the stream and destroying all local privileges.
There are no watertight compartments in the human realm,
and devaluation on one level provokes a corresponding devaluation
on others. Men unify by instinct, however theory may divide. If
the money which would have purchased some degree of security
yesterday is worthless today, then it is all too easy to assume that
everything of value is equally at the mercy of senseless change and
that today's good may be tomorrow's evil. No doubt it is for this
reason that coinage possessed a sacred character in earlier times
and that gold, with its rich symbolic significance, was until quite
recently the linchpin of major currencies. Remove from any
object its sacred or symbolic aspects, tossing it into the flux of
purely quantitative phenomena, and value dissolves like flesh
from bones in a vat of acid.
Not only does the depreciation of currency undermine faith in
enduring principles of any kind but, once the process accelerates
beyond a certain point, it ensures that no one can attempt to stand
on his own feet or to establish his own
base of security all must ;

turn to the State for protection. no wonder that those who

It is
harbour a deep loathing for human independence in any form,
driven as they are by a thirst for the amorphous, welcome the
inflationary process which breaks down crystallised forms and
engorges all solid, stable things. Their thirst for the amorphous
is closely akin to the need to abolish meaning which played its part

54
 THE COST OF WEALTH
in motivating the worst excesses of the Nazis. Both relate in their
turn to the deep-rooted desire —more common than is often
realised — burden of one's humanity, with all that
to slough off the
it implies in the way of choice and responsibility, and lose oneself

in anonymity and indistinction.

Like many great evils this is the dark side of a great virtue : the
bitter longing to lose oneself in the subterranean shadows and be
rid of the tyrant 'me' once and for all reflects, in monstrous parody,
the holy longing to be perfected and extinguished in the supernal
light.Those who are content with their own littleness will never
—
understand either the saint or taking the term in its most pro-
—
found sense the sinner but the fact remains that the latter means
;

to destroy us and is not easily stopped.

To those whose whole thinking process
is separative by nature

the practice of relatingphenomena which belong to very different

levels of experience must always appear strange and savours of
confusion to speak in almost the same breath of monetary in-
:

flation and of the magnetism of the infernal regions may seem to

them to negate the distinctions inherent in logic and yet, since all ;

things are connected and all derive ultimately from one source,
discursive thought cannot ignore the web of inter-connection.
Touch but a single string of a single instrument, and others beyond
number vibrate in regions beyond our ken.
Fragmentation, however, is the order of the day, and it extends
from the operations of the intellect to the realm of physical labour,
as though it were the nature of the disintegrative process to break
all things into small, easily digestible pieces. Coomaraswamy,
in this context, speaks of an industrial order in which 'none takes
all knowledge for his province, and the workman is specifically

conformed to the making of small parts of things and can make

nothing whole.' 'This excessive division of labour,' he adds, 'can
result only in the production of goods that are useful, not of those
that are beautiful for integration, co-ordination and lucidity are
;

essential to beauty, and with these the labourer has nothing to do ;

he who makes only parts of things cannot be an artist, but only a

coolie.'*
The labour of the artist and the craftsman has indeed its special
dignity, but the claptrap that is often talked about the 'dignity of
* The Rg Veda as Land-Nama-Bok : Ananda Coomaraswamy (Luzac &
Co.).

55
 KING OF THE CASTLE
labour' in the industrial context is misleading, since it misses the
point. In the traditional view, labour which is not, at least in some
measure, a ritual operation (therefore 'imitating' the action of the
'gods') and of which the products are without beauty or significance
is unfit for free men. Value is reflected in wholes, not in fragments
or fragmentary operations, and men's innate repugnance to futility
is aroused by involvement in valueless activities. Our lives are too
short for us to spend them in such a way as this and if we deprive ;

men some measure, enduring

of the things that are whole and, in
and deny them the opportunity to make such things, we must
expect in the long run to produce sick men, rootless men, flotsam
in the stream of time.

The corroding sense of futility arises also wherever people are

denied the opportunity to act responsibly ; the opportunity to do
good and, thereby, to straighten what is crooked in themselves,
or to do ill and suffer for it in short, to save their souls or to damn
;

them. In essence, freedom is not so much a matter of being loosed

from certain bonds, except in so far as these bonds inhibit action,
but rather the opportunity to do something and, in doing it, to
show what we are. Since the late eighteenth century there has
been an obsessive concern with the idea of freedom from things,
rather than freedom to do things. Although these two aspects are
often inter-dependent, they are not always so.
Even from the negative point of view —freedom from things
the contemporary assumption that men never before enjoyed
such freedom as they do now is open to question. Slavery, we are
told, was the most and inhuman system of labour ever devised,
evil
yet the definition of slavery is basically this to have a master and:

to be in no position to defy him, except by an act of exceptional

daring, to be without property, and to be compelled to pass one's
life in servile labour. In real terms, the opposite condition to slavery
is self-employment ; and to encourage self-employment, which is

economically inefficient and politically anarchic, is the last thing

that our industrial age can afford to do or that political collectivism
can permit.
In the times of slavery, understood in the historical sense, a
free man who scratched a bare living for himself was still regarded
as incomparably superior to the slave, though the latter might be
better fed and better clothed. Subjection to the laws and necessities

56
 THE COST OF WEALTH
of nature has always been regarded as a far nobler status than
subjection to the will of other men ;
and, in the modern context,
one might go further and suggest that a difference of quality also
exists between the latter condition (which is still within the realm
of personal relationships) and that of the man who is subject to
the rules and regulations of a vast, impersonal organisation. As
between the labourer and the white-collar worker (or jobholder)
it may be said that the former still enjoys the greater freedom,

since he is not compelled by social pressures to seek advancement

within the organisation and has no need to maintain a 'middle-class'
style of living but we are promised that machines will soon take
;

over most forms of unskilled labour. If this is so, the vast majority
in the 'developed' countries will be jobholders and this will become
the pattern to be imitated, so far as may be possible, in the 'de-
veloping' world. Maximum efficiency in the use of human material
for the production of social wealth requires that no one should
escape the net.
Since the same needs press both upon the socialist bloc and
upon the and both have much the same goal in
'capitalist' sector

view, the solutions to which they are driven look more and more
alike. In a society in which everyone is, directly or indirectly, an
employee of the State, there can be no escape for the man who docs
not conform to what is required of him there is nowhere else to
;

go. At present — and one must be thankful for small mercies it —

is still possible in the 'West' for a man to walk out of his job and

go to work for a rival establishment but it would be rash to sup-

;

pose that this particular freedom will endure. A process of economic

unification is taking place, and must take place if the machine is to
function efficiently, whereby small businesses are absorbed by
larger ones which, in their turn, find common interests which
supersede their rivalry, while the State —in the 'public interest'
breathes down their necks. The number of possible employers
shrinks, and doors close one by one nor are there any more open
;

spaces or lands beyond the sea to which a man might at least

dream of escaping, as the slave of earlier times could escape over
the mountains or in a small boat. He would need to satisfy the
immigration authorities and to hold a work permit. Parallel with
the increasing control now exercised by states within their borders,
a situation has arisen in recent years which effectively imprisons
people in the country of their birth. To regard this process with

57
 KING OF THE CASTLE
anything but dread, as the walls close in upon us, suggests an
almost unnatural immunity from claustrophobia even the smallest ;

animals struggle a little when they feel themselves trapped.

It may be said that the jobholder is still in a very different posi-
tion from that of the slave, since he does not risk death if he rebels
or tries to escape. This point turns on an assessment of pressures
and their subjective effectiveness. The threat of death is one pos-
sible pressure among others. The threat of poverty or of disgrace
and humiliation is another and there are men who prefer death
;

to dishonour and the loss of all those things that seemed to make
life worth living. There are more ways than one to skin a cat.

There would be little point in saying that ordinary people

should have a stronger spirit of independence. We are dealing
here with the facts of human living, not with ideals, since it is

these facts which will determine the future of our kind. There are
circumstances —and social pressures —in terms of which the
breaking of a career and failure in a given profession are feared
quite as much as death and torture were feared under other dis-
pensations. Few men live only for the delight of existence —for
love and friendship ;
and sound and touch and still less
sight —
hope of the beatific vision. The major-
for the joys of religion or in
ity, including those who have the power to determine our political

and economic future, need some kind of professional achievement

to stave off the sense of futility which haunts the modern world.
Such achievement is necessarily measured in terms of a ladder
which may, in itself, lead nowhere but which seems important to
those who know nothing of any greater glory. To be threatened
with the loss of one's place on the ladder is then a most powerful
sanction. When men are to be made docile it is not the outward
gravity of the sanctions that matters, but their subjective effective-
ness.
To foster liberty means, for a start, to reduce the pressures
which prevent the ordinary, less than heroic man from thinking
and acting as a responsible being, one who carries his own burden
and chooses for himself. Pressures are seldom noticed until they
are fully applied (by which time it may be too late to resist).
While the system under which we live is operated in a humane
way and remains sufficiently elastic still to permit some regard for
the individual and his awkward needs, we think that we can safely
ignore the reserve powers which are steadily building up in the

58
 THE COST OF WEALTH
armoury of the State, just as we ignore the nuclear potential of the
'super-powers', in the cheerful conviction that sensible people
will never make use of the weapons either of oppression or of
destruction which are now available. Such optimism betrays a
singular ignorance of human nature. When we consider the many
separate factors which point unmistakably in one direction and
project the lines of their development only a little way into the
future we have every reason to look to our defences. The slave
with a kind, indulgent master might have little cause to fault the
institution of slavery unless he considered the extent of his own
dependence on that master's continuing good will. It is not a good
thing to be defenceless, even when we see only kind faces around us.
A however is not merely one that lends
society of jobholders
most conveniently to regimentation it is also a society in
itself ;

which the majority have little opportunity to satisfy their need to

do and to make things that have their individual mark upon them.
This need can be satisfied in the co-operative efforts of a small
group, a tribe or a family, but not in the impersonal achievements
of a vast organisation. Just as the labourer now makes only little

bits of things, so the jobholder does only little bits of things.

The member of such an organisation, unless he occupies some
quite special position, never far from the sense of 'non-entity',
is

and it is no coincidence that this term should be the very one that
defines, in traditional doctrine, the character of the profane as
opposed to the sacred realm (which is essentially the realm of
being, of meaning and of acts that are real). He is not a cog in the
—
machine for machines are in serious trouble when a cog breaks
but something more dispensable, an interchangeable unit. He
supplies a quantum of effort or of energy which could as well
be supplied by almost anyone else. Those who know in their
hearts that they are not really necessary —
and are entirely replace-
able — must inevitably be tempted to misrepresent the nature of
their work and build up a false notion of its importance. A further
alienation from truth takes place, a further loss of contact with
reality. And one thing we can be sure of is that self-deception,
whether on the level of the wind and the rain or on that of spiritual
reality, must always come up against the real sooner or later, and
that its destruction is very painful. 'Truth has come and deception
has vanished away deception is indeed by nature perishable.'*
;

* Quran, 17:81.

59
 KING OF THE CASTLE
Two other factors play their part in undermining the jobholder's
inner security and therefore his capacity for defending his in-
tegrity. The first
is the artificiality of the rewards which he receives

for his work there is no immediate or necessary connection

;

between his monthly pay packet and what he has done or achieved.
The relation between action and its reward has been obscured
and may easily have been forgotten. For this man, unprepared by
experience for the precarious nature of human life, there can only
be a sense of outrage when he is brought into sharp and brutal
contact with reality. He feels, as Thibon says, "That was due to
*

me and I have not had it, so this is injustice !" '. It is all so unfair,
— —
and unfairness he thinks has no right to exist. Therefore
reality does not have the right to be what it is, and everything is
askew. 'The great fevers of revolt in our time proceed in large
part from this narrow and materialistic sense of justice inherent
in a society which has lost all communion with the elementary
sources of life.'*

Secondly, there is no between the genera-

effective continuity
tions in a society of jobholders. Whatever the achievements of the
functionary, however good his position at the end of a lifetime
of meritorious service, what he has achieved dies with him and
a stranger steps into his shoes. His family has no role in his work
his children can play no part in helping him to maintain or build
up something that they will eventually inherit. There are no crops
to be sown and reaped, and he has nothing to hand onto them. The
—
strongest of all family bonds shared interest and participation
in the work by which the family gains its livelihood has been —
severed, so that parents and children have little in common beyond
the biological link. As among the beasts, the children go out
naked into the world and the aged die alone.
Before our eyes in the course of decades, not centuries, a new
kind of world is coming into being, a world populated almost
exclusively by dependants but dependent upon whom and with
;

what safeguards ? Whether those who control the machinery of the

State, the leaders in one country or another, have seized power or
been elected by a mass-electorate which votes only on immediate,
bread-and-butter issues, and whether they are motivated by self-
interest or by good intentions, one thing is sure they are them-:

selves controlled by forces of change which they do not understand

* Retour au Reel: Gustave Thibon (Lardanchet), p. 19.

60
 THE COST OF WEALTH
and, in obeying these forces, they are restrained neither by im-
mutable principles nor by the weight of custom and tradition. The
brakes have been taken off and there is nothing to suggest that
;

these people know where they are going.

There are valid precedents for thinking of the forces of change
as directed by something rather different to blind chance in other
;

words, for 'personifying' them. Our ancestors would not have

hesitated to speak of satanic forces, believing as they did that man
must serve either God or the devil.
No doubt such phraseology seems too naive in the contemporary
context —although one might remember the saying that the devil
—
works best when he works disguised but, whatever the terms
used, the facts are plain enough. We are being hustled willy-nilly
in a certain direction, far from all the landmarks to which humanity
has been accustomed and, if we do not know what it is we are
;

going to, we can at least see what it is we are going from and judge
thereby the loss we have suffered.
 3
LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE

How far does a wise child go in pursuit of a butterfly when the

terrain is treacherous ? How far should any of us go in pursuit of
what we want? Modern political theories offer so many good
—
things at the end of the road social justice, prosperity, security
and the hunter's instinct is aroused. One does not always notice
the point at which the quarry changes shape, as all relative and
contingent goods are liable to do, and becomes a siren luring us
into very dangerous places.
Rationalism is by nature incautious and
it operates in terms of

very simple, unambiguous alternatives something is good, then

: if

its true nature has been identified once and for all and we should

grasp it without hesitation (roses have no thorns in this scheme of

things), regardless of irrational 'taboos' and regardless of timid
people who dread change. There are no longer any markers to tell
us when we are entering the danger area, for the traditional and
customary restraints which formerly set a limit to the possibilities
of straying have been removed. And yet the habit of expecting to
be stopped if we go too far still endures. It is difficult to adjust
to the fact that there is no longer anyone to tell us where and when
to stop.
The good things of this world reflect the ambiguity inherent
in thehuman condition itself. They are mixed blessings and, in
dealing with them, our judgment needs to be as sound as that of a
healthy belly which knows when it has had enough. What most
endangers us is the indiscriminate and unrestrained pursuit of
things which, taken in small measure, may be thoroughly desirable
but, in excess, poison the system. Tt's only a matter of degree' is
a phrase that should inspire fear and suspicion. The difference
between an ordered society and a totalitarian one is a matter of
degree. The difference between farmyard and animal factory is a
matter of degree, as is that between hand-loom and conveyor belt

62
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
or, for that matter, between a pleasurable sensation and agonising
pain. In most cases the progression from one extreme to the other
is gradual, a smooth curve on which are posted no warning signs

to tell us when a good thing is about to become an evil one or to

indicate the point of no return. Powers of discrimination and a
capacity for choice such as were never before required are now
essential to our survival as responsible beings.
The rationalist takes things one by one, and he can always point
to the single —
phenomenon a new technological development or
a —
new law passed to deal with a specific problem and ask whether
there is anything sinister in this. Sound judgment however takes
a wider view. It is essential to place present events in some kind of
historical context and, despite the impossibility of seeing ahead
with any certainty, to calculate future probabilities in terms of the
tendencies apparent here and now. In judging a single incident,
perhaps trivial in itself, we should ask two questions : is this inci-
dent our times and therefore likely to be repeated,
fairly typical of
and, if so, what will happen should it repeat itself over and over
again in the course of the next few years? Each such incident
must, therefore, be placed in series if we are to make at least an
educated guess as to the direction in which it points.
One cannot consider the period of history which forms the
background to these 'incidents' without taking into account the
systems which came into being between 19 17
totalitarian political
and the outbreak of the Second World War. The masses were
seized by new masters, fascist or socialist, and responded so readily
to their heady theories that free elections would almost certainly
have given them majorities which any 'democratic' leader might
envy. The rigid distinction commonly made between Fascism and
Socialism is, to say the least, of doubtful validity. Mussolini, after
all, started his career as a fairly orthodox socialist, and his fascist
ideology was to a great extent inspired by Marx's errant disciple,
Georges Sorel. Hitler —who once proclaimed, T am a fanatical
socialist !'
—chose to regard his party as a socialist one and detested
capitalism even while he made use of individual capitalists.
Totalitarianism and collectivism are still what they are, no

matter what the local variations in the gimcrack theories by which

they seek to justify their existence. Hitler's New Order, ruled by a
golden-haired race of supermen, was neither more nor less absurd
than the Marxist-Leninist dream of a heaven on earth in which

63
 KING OF THE CASTLE
the historical process comes to an abrupt end and everyone is

eternally nice to everyone else. What these ideologies have in

common far outweighs their differences, and one thing they most
obviously have in common is hatred of the 'old order' and bitter
opposition to everything that can be described as 'traditional'. They
represent a blind movement of change, understood in its most
malignant and destructive sense. The only possible relationship
that can exist between them and religion (as the quintessence of
all that has come down to us from the past) is one of mortal

combat.
Itwould be pointless to debate whether Hitler, considered
as a man, was more 'evil' than Lenin or Stalin these were creatures
:

thrown up, so to speak, from the depths they were what they were
;

and had their part to play in the historical process. But his in-
fluence has been of very particular significance over the past thirty
years in its effect upon political theory and popular thought. His
shadow still darkens a whole area of debate, and it has been almost
impossible to oppose left-wing ideas without being accused of
'fascist' — —
therefore Hitlerite inclinations he has taken the place
;

of the devil in contemporary mythology and therefore everything

that he touched or is presumed to have thought is, by definition,
diabolical.
An absurd and yet very effective equation has been drawn up
Hitler wasman of the 'Right', therefore everything that savours
a
of philosophy and every attempt to defend the old order
'rightist'

in one country or another is tainted with his wickedness. This

indeed is his posthumous triumph, for no man could have hated
the old order more bitterly. He was as much an apostle of change
and just as much a product of anti-traditional theories as Lenin.
Quite apart however from the special place which Hitler occu-
pies in contemporary demonology, the Nazi example of totali-
tarianism may be said to have a greater relevance to our situation
than the Soviet one. For obvious historical reasons the Russians
have been regarded by Western Europeans as a people apart,
outside the mainstream of civilisation as it has been understood in
the past two-and-a-half centuries. Nobody could be surprised at
anything they did 'they are not like us'. The Germans, on the
:

other hand, are our kind of people. This, no doubt, is why the
events which took place under the Nazi regime came as such a
traumatic shock they could not be shrugged aside as the aberra-
;

64
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
tions of an alien race, and Europe was brought face-to-face with an
aspect of its own nature.
The Nazi concentration camps were not, as some would like
to think, a kind of throw-back to the 'dark ages' ; on the contrary,
they were a very modern phenomenon, and the senseless brutality
that sometimes took place in them has little significance compared
with the purposeful exploitation of human material which was their
primary function. They belong to our age, whether we like it or
not, and what was done in Belsen and Buchenwald, Auschwitz and
Sachsenhausen is not yet ready to be filed away in the archives.
There are many points of view from which their relevance
to our age — —
and to our future cannot be ignored. Of these, two
seem particularly significant: the first relates to the nature of the
obedience, both on the part of the civil servants who administered
the camps and on that of the inmates, which made the system
possible ; the second to the morality in terms of which this obedi-
ence was justified.
A senior official of one of the camps had, as a motto on his letter-
heads, 'There is only one thing that is valid: Orders.' And indeed,
when everything else has gone, 'orders' remain. Rudolf Hoess
sometime Commandant of Auschwitz and an efficient and con-
scientious man, tells us in his autobiography that his father was
'a determined opponent of the Reich Government and its policy',

yet always reminded his friends that 'however strong one's opposi-
tion might be, the laws and decrees of the State had to be obeyed
unconditionally.' Many good men elsewhere in the civilised world
would have nodded their approval and might still do so and yet ;

one is bound to wonder whether, had Papa Hoess been a less

exemplary father, his son would have been the man he was.
The peripheral features of religion show a remarkable tendency
to survive for long periods after the centre has gone out of sight.
Christians who have lost their faith may still observe certain rules
of Christian morality; Muslims who no longer pray may still
avoid pork and wine, and one finds 'primitive' tribes observing
the taboos long after they have forgotten the doctrine which gave
validity to these taboos. In the same way, a kind of conditioned
reflex responsive to the word of authority remains active long
after the very idea of legitimate authority (that is to say, an author-
ity which merely administers what is believed to be a God-given
order) has been completely lost; indeed, this reflex may become
65
 KING OF THE CASTLE
all the more powerfully established as a last defence against social
chaos. In Germany during the Nazi period the sense of a cate-
gorical imperative to obey the men who give commands persisted
even when authority was vested in creatures who seemed uniquely
destined to deface human dignity and therefore to bring the very
notion of human fitness for command into disrepute. Hoess says
and there is no reason to doubt him that no SS officer would —
have contemplated raising a hand against Himmler even in his
most secret thoughts: 'as Reichsfiihrer SS, his person was in-
violable'; his basic orders were 'sacred' and 'brooked no con-
sideration, no argument, no interpretation.'*
— —
These are or should be startling words: 'inviolable', 'sacred'.
The Sun King, the divine Emperor, is inviolable and the sacred
surrounds him as a numinous cloud; but this man was from the
dregs of humankind. It is only quite recently that the majority
of people have been deprived of belief in an ordered universe
which is related to other, unseen realms of order in a total harmony.
Once this belief has been destroyed and there appears to be no
true order inherent in the very nature of things it is not difficult
to conclude that only 'orders' will keep chaos at bay, no matter who
gives them.
'See,' says the Quran, 'in the creations of the heavens and the
and day, and the ships which run
earth, the differences of night
upon the and in the ordinance of the winds and the clouds,
sea . . .

obedient between heaven and earth, are signs for those who are
aware. 'f Human obedience, in common with the obedience of all
natural things to natural laws, reflects a Norm in which all have
their rootsand from which they derive their significance; but,
when is no true authority to act as a magnet, it seizes upon
there
whatever comes within its range, and man's enormous capacity for
obeying God and thereby integrating himself into a universal
order is perverted into an instrument of enslavement.

In the concentration camps it was not only the officials and the
guards who were bound by 'orders'; their victims also suffered
the power of this spell. Whether we consider the ordinary inmates
or such special prisoners as the doctors who did monstrous work
'because they had no alternative', our feelings tend to be am-
biguous. On the one hand, we may very reasonably feel that we
* Commandant of Auschwitz: Rudolf Hoess (Pan Books), p. 162.
t Quran, II : 164.

66
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
ourselves, under such pressures as they suffered, would have done
as they did on the other, we are troubled by the suspicion that this
;

is not the whole story. Individual rebellion against the camp

authorities meant almost certain death, and yet quite ordinary men
have faced an equal certainty of death in battle and, under many
different circumstances throughout the ages, people have given
their lives to save their fellows or for a cause in which they believed.
However strong the instinct of self-preservation may be, it is

astonishing how many have defied it, whether for a principle or,
quite simply, in a rage.
Natural passions might have been expected to reinforce the
urge to revolt. Quite apart from brutality and overwork, the
prisoners suffered constant public humiliation of the most extreme
kind. Homicidal rage would have been a natural reaction. More-
over, for those who were unlucky in the work to which they were
assigned or who were in poor health, the chances of survival were
negligible, and under such circumstances death might have seemed
more palatableif a man could take one of his persecutors with him.

And yet so few, so very few, did in fact revolt. The case is remem-
bered of a beautiful Jewish woman who, stripped naked before
the guards, seized an officer's revolver from its holster and shot him
dead but most were spellbound by 'orders' and obeyed the only
;

authority that existed in their world.

It takes two sides to make a tyranny : the tyrant and the tyran-
nised. Plato maintained that slaves deserved their condition, in
that those who were not of servile nature would prefer death to
enslavement. There are circumstances under which a man of
noble character finds his life of little account and is proud to cast
it away.
According to Plotinus, 'Bad men rule by the feebleness of the
ruled, and this is just' and it is commonly said that people get
;

the government they deserve. If responsibility has any real mean-

ing and if human beings have a special dignity by virtue of their
fitness for responsibility, then it is irresponsible not only to do
ill under pressure but also to suffer ill passively. A harsh doctrine

indeed, and certainly not a popular one but it would be foolish ;

to suppose that it is an easy thing to be a man.

How often one hears the decent citizen of our time, functionary
or official, say with becoming modesty 'I didn't make the rules
:

it's not for me to question my orders !' Perhaps at some other time,

67
 KING OF THE CASTLE
in some other one might applaud his sense of duty but too
place, ;

much has happened we have seen too much

in the past forty years,
of what dutiful obedience may involve, and we have lost our inno-
cence. Not to be frightened by statements of this kind, not to
wonder how this good man would have behaved under the orders
of the Reichsfuhrer SS, one needs to be either very complacent
or very optimistic.
Until he has been put to the test, no man can be trusted not to do
monstrous things under the orders of an authority which he either
fears or respects. Wives do not recognise their husbands nor
children their fathers when this particular note is struck, and our
friend goes away from us into a land of obedience where there is
no more choice, no more responsibility, no more manhood.
In the United States in the early 'sixties an experiment was
carried out which, surprisingly, surprised its sponsors. Volunteers
were invited to take part in tests supposedly concerned with the
effects of punishment on learning ability. The 'learner' (in fact
an actor coached for his part) was strapped to his seat with an
electrode fastened to his wrist the volunteer 'teacher' sat in an
;

'experimental room' before a shock generator with a bank of

switches ranging from 15 to 450 volts. Each time the 'learner'
made a mistake or refused to answer a question the 'teacher' was
instructed to give him a shock of increased intensity. The 'learner's'
protests grew more strident until, at 285 volts, he screamed in
agony meanwhile the calm voice of authority overrode the teacher's
;

hesitations 'It is absolutely essential that you continue

: You . . .

have no other choice, you must go on !'

'To our consternation,' says Professor Milgram, who set up the
experiment, 'even the strongest protests from the victim did not
prevent many subjects from administering the harshest punishment
ordered by the experimenter,' and he comments that 'ordinary
people simply doing their jobs without any particular hostility on
their part can become agents in a terrible destructive process.'*
The 'teachers' saw themselves as not being responsible for their
own actions, but merely as the agents of an external authority T :

wouldn't have done it myself I was just doing what I was told'
;

was the usual explanation offered in interviews held after the

experiment. To rebut the suggestion that those who shocked the
victim at the most severe level must have been from the 'sadistic
* Obedience to Authority: Stanley Milgram (Harper & Row, Inc).

68
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
fringe of society', Professor Milgram points out that two-thirds of
the participants fell into the category of 'obedient' subjects, and
they represented 'ordinary people drawn from working, mana-
gerial and professional classes'. An appeal had been made to their
'better natures', their sense of duty and respect for authority ; no
other pressures were brought to bear.
Some such sense of duty, in addition to the fear of losing their
livelihood and suffering disgrace, motivates the obedience to
authority of those in whose hands our lives and welfare rest. What
the public sees, particularly through the media, is Government, a
regime, a President or Prime Minister but the closer one ap-
;

proaches to the centres of power the more aware one becomes of

the role played by the instrument of government, the Civil Service.
The most powerful ruler in the world could sit in his office mouth-
ing orders until his voice failed without humble and obedient
;

servants to execute his orders he would be talking to himself.

In those countries which permit strike action, powerful in-
dustrial groups are in a position to cause considerable incon-
venience, but there is only one group which could really 'bring a

country to its knees', abolish Government on the instant or

paralyse even the most ruthless dictator merely by turning a deaf
ear to what is said. The increasing complexity of industrial
societies and their dependence upon a vast administrative machine
which is, in fact, composed entirely of human beings each with —
a capacity for choice —
has placed an astonishing power in the
hands of civil servants. When evil men occupy the seats of titular
power in one country or another they do so only by courtesy of
good men, who obey them without question, giving so much the —
—
best they have to give to purposes which they do not think it
their right or duty to assess. Naked evil as such can seldom operate
in our world. It must wear a dress acceptable to the morality of the
period, for men are only successfully misled if they believe that
they are following the path of virtue.
T myself derive no real satisfaction from my labours unless I
have completed a good job of work thoroughly.' This might be
any conscientious civil servant speaking. In fact it is the late Rudolf
Hoess expressing his view of the human function. Given his
liking for platitudes, he might well have added that, if a job is
worth doing at all, it is worth doing well, and presumably he died
with a sense of achievement. Many lesser men today, making their

69
 KING OF THE CASTLE
small contribution to the world's 'progress', enjoy a similar sense
of achievement.
Before putting too much reliance upon the ordinary, decent
man's moral sense to protect us against the degeneration of human
society into inhuman shape there are three points which should be
borne in mind. First, the moral man (in the commonly accepted
sense of the term) is in most cases disciplined and obedient, con-
forming to current standards in the belief that his conformity
contributes to the wellbeing of his society. Secondly, defiance
of a tyrannical government is likely to provoke savage reprisals not
only against the rebel himself but also against his family and
neighbours, so that 'innocent' people suffer. Thirdly, a man who
is sexually restrained, honest in money matters and respectful
of by-laws may still be capable of great wickedness when he meets
a situation for which his moral rules do not provide.
In a stable and relatively unchanging society which lives within
sight of eternal principles —within sight of the 'mountain' of which
—
we spoke earlier such morality may be the main support of
ordered human living but somewhere along the line, as religion
;

and the sense of the Absolute faded into the lengthening shadows,
the solid citizen's moral sense was left by the wayside to be picked
up by the agents of darkness.
Moreover opposition to the State's authority—however un-
mistakably evil this may be —cannot always take 'moral' forms,
particularly under present conditions. As the technology at the
disposal of governments becomes more sophisticated the oppor-
tunities for the rebel to raise his voice in the market-place diminish,
and a time is surely approaching when resistance will be possible
only through cheating, subterfuge and sabotage. It is easier to be a
public martyr than to do sly and underhand things in a good cause.
To return for a moment to the case of the civil servant, which is
central to this issue, there are circumstances —
and it is not necessary
to name the countries in which such circumstances already exist
or in which they might exist in the future under which an —
official who defies his masters simply disappears, either killed or
else removed to a safe place where his voice will not be heard.
But what of his colleague who happens to lose vital papers at the
critical moment, who innocently misinterprets his orders and
misunderstands his instructions, who addresses letters to the
wrong persons and despatches prisoners to the wrong destination ?

70
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
He will lose his chances of promotion but he will survive to
;

throw more spanners in the works.

The issue is a complex one, the dilemma almost insoluble for
those who depend upon current theories or passing fashions in
morality to provide them with guidance. A heavy burden of
decision is placed squarely on the shoulders of the individual, for
although it is customary to speak of evil political regimes main-
taining themselves in power through the 'passive' acceptance with
which people submit to their rule, the fact is that no modern
regime can survive for long without active and, indeed, con-
scientious cooperation on the part of a large and fairly representa-
tive section of the population.
In these circumstances many sensible people will take refuge
in the principle of legality, convinced that they cannot go far
wrong so long as they obey the law.
One is often told that respect for the law is the very foundation
of civilised livingand that, without this, there can only be disorder,
injustice and the triumph of the strong over the weak. This is no
doubt true enough within certain limits but we can no longer
;

say it without stopping to ask who makes the laws and what are
the principles upon which they are based. That is the price we pay
for having broken free from the shelter of religion and the re-
straints of custom. Nothing can be taken for granted any longer
and the conservatively minded people who would like to see the
law obeyed without question seem to have forgotten the Nurem-
berg Laws and to be unaware of the nature of 'socialist legality' in
the countries of the socialist bloc; moreover they are harking back
to a period when the actual number of laws to be obeyed was a
tiny fraction of those which now encompass us and when vast
areas of human living which are now rigidly controlled were free
and open. There must clearly be a limit to the sheer quantity of
— —
laws and therefore of restrictions which can or should be
tolerated. Beyond this limit, legality in the traditional sense no
longer has any meaning.
Behind the law, as we now understand it, is the ruler or the
ruling oligarchy. This was not always so. There was a time when
law was assumed to be the application of universal principles to
the human situation at a particular moment and under particular
circumstances. As such it enjoyed something of the respect accord-
ed to these principles. Today it is, for the most part, the expression
 KING OF THE CASTLE
of Mr X or General Y's wishes, and there is no particular call to
respect their wishes. The fact that some assembly or
legislative
parliament may have put its rubber stamp on the legislation does
not really alter the situation.
To point this out is not to advocate anarchy, but only to suggest
that, while fictions serve a useful purpose (and modern democratic
societies are dependent upon a variety of fictions), truth will out
in the end and sensible people prepare themselves for the day
when this happens. Secular societies in the West are still to a
considerable extent living 'on capital'. Their laws no longer have
the backing either of religion or of ancient custom but still benefit
from the respect habitually accorded to laws which did have such
backing, either Vertically' (relating them to the sacred, the trans-
cendent) or 'horizontally' (relating them to centuries of traditional
practice). The notion that they are somehow legitimised as ex-
pressions of the 'will of the People' is a fiction that may have its

usefulness but soon wears thin.

—
For the moment and for our comfort we in the 'West' may—
be thankful that these laws are for the most part obeyed or at least
considered to merit obedience but such is the momentum of
;

change in the second half of the twentieth century that a society

may be transformed in a very short time, even without revolution,
and extreme vigilance is required. Here, precisely, is one of those
'contingent goods' mentioned earlier, good today and bad tomor-
—
row, changing shape almost overnight as the German people
discovered to their cost some years ago. The Germans had been
so much admired for their sense of order and discipline and for
their efficiency, but these were the very qualities which made the
phenomenon of Hitlerism possible. Given the speed with which
events are moving, no nation dare suppose itself safe from the
good servants of evil who pride themselves on doing their job
and doing it well. Under such circumstances Happy the man who :

lives in a slovenly and incompetent land where civil servants

can be bribed to betray their trust and the bungling administration
is incapable of putting any plan into effect

—
As it is, the pressures political, social and, above all, economic
— are growing in number and in weight nowhere is there a land
;

which can bask in the sunshine and let the cruel world go by.
Measures deemed necessary to deal with these pressures come
increasingly to resemble those adopted as a means of survival in

72
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
time of war the greater the threat, the less tolerance there can be
;

for anything that interferes with the 'war effort', that is to say
with the marshalling and exploitation of all available resources,
not least of human resources.

The concentration camps were designed, not as places of

punishment (for punishment is either a religious or a sentimental
concept and has no place among the techniques of efficiency), but
to serve three purposes to act as powerhouses of labour at the
:

service of the State, to keep out of circulation people who might

have interfered with the smooth functioning of the State mach-
inery, and, finally, as centres for the extermination of those who did
not appear to fit into the monolithic structure of the State.
If we understand by sadism a lust for inflicting pain, then,
by all was no higher proportion of sadists and
accounts, there
bullies among the camp guards than would be found among
prison guards anywhere. Bettelheim remarked that it was very
rare for a guard to give up five minutes of his free time to torment
the prisoners.
It was simply a question of applying scientific techniques to
break the human and grind down the human person into
will
exploitable shape ;words to make him 'useful'. From
in other
kicks and blows to obscene tortures, everything was designed to
make the machine function. A group of prisoners working with a
stone-breaking machine in a camp quarry worked very much
harder after one of their number had been fed into the stone-
breaker.
People come in such awkward shapes and sizes that it is not
always easy to beat them into uniformity. This is a problem with
which socialism has always had to cope, and the National Socialists
borrowed most of their techniques from the more experienced
Marxist Socialists of the Russian Empire. These techniques were
inevitably crude and involved the use of pain, terror and humilia-
tion. But such methods are not altogether satisfactory and tend to
provoke troublesome reactions. The Russian Revolution itself
provoked a civil war which very nearly nipped it in the bud, and
cruelty may in the long run twist society into shapes quite dif-
ferent to those intended by its perpetrators. It is better, from the
collectivist point of view, to manipulate people by appeals to their
'better nature' and by persuasion. The end result is the same.

73
 KING OF THE CASTLE
The key-wordhere is co-operation. After describing the ways
in which every attempt by a prisoner in the camps to protect his
personality from being completely destroyed or, for that matter,
to help his friends involved co-operating with the system and
therefore contributing to its efficient functioning, Bettelheim
concludes : 'Within so tight a system as the concentration camp
any defence that stayed within the frame of reference of the system
promoted the goals of the system, not those of the defence. It
seems that an institution like the concentration camp permits of
—
no really successful defence the only way not to submit to it in
some measure would have been to destroy it.'*
The same could be said of a collectivist system gradually
imposed by the democratic vote, which may in practice mean the
vote of thirty percent or so of the electorate, and in such a case
so-called moral sanctions can be brought to bear on those who
resist its imposition. The Will of the People —
grotesquely clothed
in all the majesty of the divine Will —
may then have been ex-
pressed by a few thoughtless voters who marked their crosses on
a ballot paper in favour of someone who promised them a better
house or cheaper food and those who defy this will must be either
;

mad or bad.
Atleast in the Russian Revolution the issues were clear-cut.
No one could imagine that Lenin represented the Russian people
or that he had any other aim but to impose his ideology by force.
Nazi Germany, by its atrocities and by Hitler's self-advertise-
ment, demonstrated its true character for all the world to see. It
is in the urbane societies of the West, with their tame populations

made gentle by decades of prosperity, that deception flourishes

and issues are muffled under layers of liberalism and apparent
good will. If these societies are drawn into the collectivist net, it
will not be kicking and screaming, but anaesthetised in a soft
institutional bed.
By whatever means —cruel or kind— 'so tight a system' comes
into existence, it cannot be resisted within its own 'frame of
reference'. As in so many human situations, the more a man
struggles to free himself the more surely he is trapped. An exit
from such vicious circles is to be found only in a different dimension,
in terms of a different frame of reference.
The worldly dimension, however, though it may be inwardly
* Bruno Bettelheim, op. cit. p. 235.

74
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
transcended, is not thereby annihilated ; and on this level there are
two quite different kinds of co-operation. The first involves total
surrender ; the victim is persuaded to accept the world's frame of
reference, its principles, measurements and standards, and the
'camp' —or whatever other enclosed space he inhabits—becomes
the prisoner's only reality. Bettelheim remarked upon the fact that
old prisoners tended to identify with the SS, not only in goals and
values, but even in appearance, trying to make their prison garb
look as much as possible like an SS uniform. They wanted to look
'smart', they said, and to look smart meant to look as much like
their gaolers as they could.
There is however a and this
different kind of cooperation,
may be described as tactical. The
bends before the wind
tree that
survives let the wind fall for a few moments, and it straightens
;

itself. But, for this, rootedness is essential and, men being what ;

they are, physical rootedness is not enough (although it provides

a good foundation). Only that which is supernaturally based can
stand firm against the principalities and powers of this world, and
only the man who is inwardly established in a different dimension
to that in which the wind carries all before it has any hope of
retaining the core of integrity and independence which is alone fit
to save him from destruction. Modern societies or perhaps one —
should say the forces which drive them are, in some sense, aware —
of this, which is why their citizens must be prevented (particularly
through the education of the young) from catching sight of any
other dimensions of being and why religion must be made a
function of society, serving its ends. The exploitation of all avail-

able resources requires that men should be, as it were, melted

down to fuel the process and the ; inner core of integrity is resistant
to fire.
For those who have caught sight at least of the outworks of
heaven and of a different kind of order to the one unbelievers
would like to impose universally, 'tactical' cooperation is often
the only alternative to martyrdom.
Already in many countries the religious believer walks each day
of his life in enemy territory. Such is the trend of opinion else-
where that one must expect this situation to become increasingly
common. In terms of the kind of societies now under construction
and of the goals they set themselves, the man whose priorities
conflict totally with theirs must inevitably be considered anti-social,

75
 KING OF THE CASTLE
a true Enemy of the People. God's spies therefore employ
such disguises as suit their purpose. Not for them the clash of
swords or the martyr's crown, but rather a quiet watchfulness and
the readiness to act when action is opportune. They are engaged
in the Holy War as surely as any warrior on the field of battle,
but their role is to be 'subtle as serpents' and to preserve by cun-
ning what can no longer be preserved by force.
—
The Nazi concentration camps or Soviet labour camps
may be taken as an image of secular society precisely because,
by their crudity, they provoke a moral shock such as their less
cruel and more sophisticated equivalents will never provoke
among people who cannot recognise the devil unless he strikes
them in the face. It is only too clear that, if ordinary men and
women are prepared, under orders or in what they are persuaded
is a good cause, to do the kind of things that have been done in

the camps (as, on a lesser scale, in Professor Milgram's 'experi-

ment'), then there is unlikely to be any limit to their readiness
to pursue relative good far beyond the point at which it changes
character, closing the ventilators which still permit men of true
stature to breathe and, always in a good cause, helping to tighten
the bonds put upon them by an earlier generation of admini-
strators (who, in their innocence, never imagined that these bonds
might one day be tightened), leaving it to their successors to con-
tinue the process to the point of strangulation.
It cannot be emphasised too often that those who scent danger
must not let themselves be deceived into looking in the wrong

direction. We are menaced less by brigands and ill-natured tyrants

than by earnest men who only wish to act rightly and who face up
bravely —too bravely sometimes —to the fact that the particular
may have to be sacrificed to the general, the individual to the
mass.
This sacrifice is made by and those who make it are
degrees,
convinced that, like most know where to stop.
sensible people, they
A small increase in control of the citizen by the benevolent State,
the closing of a loophole through which a few bad characters were
gaining an unfair advantage such measures are easily justified
;

and meet with approval. People who object to them must surely
be very selfish (as some are, for one does not need to be a saint to
be alarmed when the trap is closing), and decent people submit,
if not happily, at least in the assurance that they are behaving

76
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
responsibly. It is mostly by their better natures that the malign
fisherman hooks his victims.
Increases in population are also a matter of degree. How many
is too many ? It is debatable how many hungry people will burden

this planet by the end of the century, but already the numbers
are far beyond any figure compatible either with freedom of
movement or with the protection of the earth we tread, its contents
and its carpeting of trees and foliage, its marvellous ornaments.
We and countless things of beauty,
are already a ravaging horde,
irreplaceable and being destroyed day by
infinitely precious, are
day. Proud individuals, families and communities are being
absorbed into the multitude, joining the ranks of the dispossessed,
and in our great cities they learn to live as units of uncertain
identity, jostling —
not meeting. Their neighbour is the man they
brush against in the crowd and there are altogether too many of
;

these neighbours for anyone to feel neighbourly. It would take all

the breath a man has even to say 'Good morning!' to each one,
let alone 'Who are you?', 'Where do you come from?', 'How do

you fit into my world?'.

The horror of these cities, inviting destruction as all horrors
do, is the isolation of each man or woman among so many people,
touching only as dummies in a shop-window touch one another.
There is number of human contacts to which we can
a limit to the
respond ; demand made upon us is excessive we retire
when the
into a subjective shell and are thereby diminished and when a ;

man is faced with a situation which requires of him more than his
resources of head and heart can supply, while being assured at
the same time that there is no God upon whom he might call for
strength or for a superhuman degree of charity, then he is grist

for any mill.

Meanwhile populations increase, and they increase chiefly
in countries which have no lingering tradition of political freedom
(since their traditions of freedom were of a different kind and
have been destroyed by the invasion of modern ideas). The prob-
lems which face any government which has to administer such
vast numbers challenge ingenuity and efficiency to breaking point.
Regulations which would suffice for the control of relatively small
numbers will no longer serve when millions are to be governed,
and the problems become so complex that everyone must do
exactly as he is told if the machine is to function at all.

77
 KING OF THE CASTLE
Science may hold out some prospect of feeding the hungry
multitudes by wringing the great globe itself like a sponge and
squeezing from it drop of nourishment it can provide,
every last
but if this is to be done the logistic problems are staggering and
the planners can operate only in terms of statistics, never of human
beings in their unclassifiable variety. There is no agreement as
to precisely when the supply of metals, fossil fuels, timber and
other resources will run out, but no one can doubt that they are
being rapidly exhausted. The process of squeezing out the final
few drops be a pretty one and, meanwhile, diminishing
will not
resources will have to be divided among more people, including
vast populations in the so-called developing countries who have
been sustained for years past only by 'rising expectations'. Dis-
possessed of the traditional ways of life which had formerly sus-
tained them, they have been left with nothing but their expectations
and are unlikely to take kindly to disappointment.
If certain basic liberties —
hard to preserve at the best of times
are essential to man's survival as something more than an intelli-
gent locust, then this will have to be asserted in new ways and
with greater force than ever before. It will have to be justified in
terms of an implacable order of priorities. Nothing will be achieved
by talking of 'inalienable' human rights when these rights must
be set in the balance against the 'right' of the multitudes to eat.

The time may come when the preservation even of a minimal

area of personal freedom costs lives ; when men, women and
children who might still be fed if the machines were allowed to
function without impediment will die such impediments are
if

permitted. We will always fudge issues while we can,

but there are
decisions and acts of choice which cannot be postponed indefinitely.
'Liberty costs lives!' could well be a slogan inciting the unfree
to tear down the last bulwarks which divide human society from
the antheap, but it is also a statement of fact. Schoolchildren are
told that, in the past, liberty was always paid for in blood, but the
lesson is never properly related to the present ; the clear implica-
tion that liberty cannot survive without the payment of this blood
fee never brought out.
is Such harsh dilemmas compel us to face
factsand make a choice, just as the concentration camp prisoner
was forced to make a choice. But perhaps this is what men are for
choosing.
It could be said, with some justification, that the choice has

78
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
already been made
so far as the majority is concerned. Here and
now few countries in which a considerable (though fast
in those
diminishing) degree of personal freedom is still preserved, liberty
is cherished only in so far as it costs nothing. Required to sacrifice

prosperity or comfort, social justice or 'fair shares', good govern-

ment or efficient administration in return for retaining a real
measure of freedom, most of our contemporaries do not so much
make a choice as refuse to recognise that any choice has to be
made. The decision goes by default. This is surely among the
most dangerous consequences of a way of thinking, a climate of
opinion, which may be defined as progressive, idealistic or opti-
mistic according to taste, but which is rooted in the refusal to
recognise or to understand the limitations inherent in the human
condition.
The can exist without the abuse of liberty
belief that liberty
or that the sheep can be loose without the wolves being loosed
let

belongs to the same order of thinking. If men are permitted to

exercise the liberty without which they are called 'men' only by
courtesy and in terms of biological definition, then the worst
among them can be controlled only by harsh and perhaps brutal
methods. The gallows-tree stands high over a society of free men.
The more obedient we are and the more effectively emasculated,
the gentler our rulers can show themselves in the exercise of their
authority, until we have a society so docile that there is no further
need for police or prisons, let alone for the gallows, and the
occasional black sheep is dealt with in a hospital for the mentally
ill.

To many people that would seem an ideal environment in which

to live out their lives —or to sleep their lives away — their chief
ambition being to travel the course from birth to death as pain-
lessly as possible. Their preference is a natural expression of the
inertiawhich is one aspect of human nature. There is something
in us which will always choose the lowest place, given the choice.
But, quite apart from the fact that we must all one day awaken
from our dreams into other dimensions in which the lie shrivels,
the fiction is destroyed and all deceptions are swept away, this
world itself is not by nature a safe pen in which the weak might
slumber unmolested. Once conditioned to such docility, the good
sheep are not left to pasture innocently, for there are forces abroad
which are ready to seize and manipulate them, carrying them into

79
 KING OF THE CASTLE
regions where their poor substance is broken and their bleating
goes unheard.
The immediate justification however, on the strictly 'daylight'
level, for making men usable and then making use of them lies
in the pressure of circumstances which require the exploitation
of all available materials. It is too easily forgotten that the world
is all of one piece —
the earth we tread, the crops we grow, the
animals upon which we feed and our own selves and exploitation —
is like a forest fire which does not distinguish between a tree, a

house and those who live in the house. We can already see, if we
are prepared to look, what the full scientific use of the animals
which provide us with meat, milk and eggs involves. There are
some who are sickened by the sight and others who accept it as an
unfortunate necessity, but subjective reactions are of only limited
interest ;we would be better advised to consider where the pro-
cess is supposed to stop.
The common belief at this present moment in history is that
human creatures belong to an animal species which, by a quite
fortuitous process, has developed certain very special skills. This
species is considered to have an inherent right to exploit all 'lower'
forms of lifeown advantage but there can be no hard and
for its ;

fast distinction between one kind of animal and another. It is all

a 'matter of degree'. For the time being residual feelings of respect
for the human state, as though it were qualitatively different to
animality, still endures. There is no reason to suppose that we
shall continue indefinitely to make this sentimental distinction.
The between our 'animal factories' and the concentra-
parallels
tion or labour camps are uncomfortably close. In a different con-
text, the treatment accorded to 'primitive' tribes in Asia, Africa
or South America suggests that the term 'human' is considered
to be fully applicable only to those among the two-legged who are
skilled in technology and properly imbued with modern ideas.
Hitler's Master Race is still alive and well, but its identity is now
defined in terms of modernism rather than of race.

Many established liberties were given up quite willingly during

the war, not least in Britain, while in the Russian Empire the
enslavement of the whole population under Stalin was justified on
the grounds that the Empire was under threat from the capitalist
world even when the guns were silent. In Germany itself, the

80
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
concentration camps and the 'final solution of the Jewish problem'
were supposed to serve a war effort and on every side man's
;

natural tendency to struggle against bondage was neutralised by a

kind of moral pressure. The sacrifice of freedom, at least in the
democratic context, is felt to be tolerable when it is temporary and
related to a specific emergency. Once the sacrifice is made, the
—
habit of freedom which takes a long time to grow and establish
—
itself is very easily lost, and we are not likely to see again the

leisurely conditions under which it develops. To be rooted in the

structure of everyday life, liberties need to grow and flower in
times of peace.
In the past, the Britishshowed a particularly firm regard for
the liberty of the subject and an almost unique distrust of the
power of the central authority. It is no coincidence that they were
the only people in Europe who had lived free from the pressures
of war for many centuries. Wars happened over the sea, where
armies marched to and fro across the great land-mass, killing,
burning and looting but for the British, untroubled by the
;

presence of violence in town and village or the brutality of armed

men in their homes, war meant the death of professional soldiers
—
and sailors a very different matter. Across the Atlantic men who
had deliberately cut themselves loose from the maelstrom set up
their great libertarian experiment in full awareness that only their
geographical situation made this possible.
The constant threat not so much of sudden death, for that
comes but of the total disruption of normal pat-
in peace or war,
—
terns of living the proximity of the jungle —
and the breaking of
ancient habits makes certain liberties appear as luxuries and
shatters the framework within which they could be taken for
granted. Under war conditions or their equivalent everything
goes into the melting pot, and priorities have to be rediscovered and
reasserted.
Under present conditions there can be no privileged areas of
peace, no hidden corners in which some group or nation might
cultivate kindness outside the stream of 'progress' and its ruthless
demands. If —
conditions of war or at least of conflict and crisis
become permanent, then the surrender of liberties is irrevocable
and we can be sure the dangers and problems we shall face in the
coming years will be no less demanding than was the Nazi threat.
But in this case there will be no victory in sight, no light at the

81
 KING OF THE CASTLE
end of the tunnel. Even if rivalry between the 'blocs' were ended
and even if population problems were solved by some massive
catastrophe, the 'triumph of ironmongery' (as Frithjof Schuon
has called it) would require a degree of organisation such as was
formerly required only for survival in war.
'There is,' said Simone Weil, 'a certain relation to time which
suits inert matter, and another sort of relation which suits thinking
beings. It is a mistake to confuse the two.'* The adaptation of
human beings to the requirements of machinery may take many
different forms we can regard the 'dark satanic mills' as a thing of
:

the past, although the modern factory with its army of slaves per-
forming tasks that provide no human satisfaction is quite satanic
enough, but the compulsion to adapt human nature to the require-
ments of ironmongery is likely to take more subtle and sophisti-
cated forms in the future. Quite apart from the fact that there has
been no occasion, since the beginning of the industrial revolution,
on which a technological advance has been set aside by a clear act
of choice, most people would now feel that we are obliged to grasp
every available instrument and to drive technological possibilities
to their limit in the hope of satisfying the needs of the multitude.
Whether such advances take the form of more complex tech-
nology, producing goods in greater quantity and at a faster rate,
or of devices for the more efficient organisation of society, they
make human resources more
the scientific or 'rational' use of
necessary; they make 'planning' essential. To achieve its objec-
tives, such planning requires human units which can be fitted into
the blueprint, doing what they are expected to do and consuming
what they are expected to consume. This calls for the progressive
narrowing of the individual's field of choice and an effective inter-
changeability as between units.
If the mass of people are to be interchangeable, they must be
equal. Since they are not by nature equal, they must be made as
nearly so as possible, and in practice this means reducing those
who possess certain awkward features of superiority to the level
of the amorphous mass. It is difficult not to see some merit in the
Marxist attribution of the beliefs and ideals current in a particular
age to economic factors, at least when this analysis is applied to the
present age (its historical applications are more questionable,
since non-material factors intervened more decisively in the past).
* The Need for Roots: Simone Weil, p. 57.

82
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
Contemporary egalitarianism has assumed a moralistic veneer, a
flavour of righteousness and even the cachet of being in accordance
with Christian ideals, a point which seems to have escaped the
greatest minds of Christendom in the ages of faith. The fact
remains that it accords very well with what are seen as the needs of
our time and with the requirements of inhuman technology. The
machines ask for faceless attendants, and earnest men who never
doubt their own superiority (which alone qualifies them to preach
to the silly mob) extol the virtues of equality.
It is easy enough to release among great numbers of people
certain negative emotions which are kept out of sight so long as
they are thought to be shameful but come quite naturally to the
surface when the normal human order is undermined and men
are left isolated in their lonely mortality, without hope of heaven
or knowledge of community.
Naked emotions, however mean or savage, are forgivable as
—
between human beings for who among us dare cast the first
—
stone? but they become less so when dressed up in borrowed
finery envy parading behind the mask of Justice is an ugly brute.
;

The 'Crabs in a barrel' mentality has become a significant feature

of our age. In the West Indies, when land crabs are to be kept
overnight before being boiled alive, they are placed in a wooden
barrel. Some try to scramble up the sides of the barrel,a few and
of them have at least a chance of escaping but the housewife has
;

nothing to fear — as soon as one crab climbs a little above its com-
panions they pull it down. Next morning the pot is filled and all are
boiled together. Mercifully, crabs have no voice with which to
proclaim their concern for social justice.
—
'Donkey say the world no level' to use another Jamaicanism
and the burdened beast in daily contact with the earth knows very
well that 'equality' is not in the nature of things. Contact with

reality atany level reminds the isolated 'ego' that there is no fair-
ness to be found anywhere unless it is prepared to look outside
its own small shell and advance towards the open spaces of true

Justice. No amount of 'social engineering' will even out the world's

unfairness as seen by the individual who refuses to emerge from
his confinement, but the attempt to impose a pattern of uni-
formity and to prevent natural advantages or factors of superiority
from asserting themselves, however unrealistic this attempt may
be, is paid for in real coinage. No means has ever been found of

83
 KING OF THE CASTLE
reconciling liberty with social justice or of evading the obligation
to make a choice between them. One of the more eminent among
the founding fathers of the United States, Alexander Hamilton,
said that inequalities of property would exist for as long as liberty
existed, such inequalities being the unavoidable result of liberty
itself, and he has yet to be proved wrong. They can only be pre-

vented (or, where they already exist, abolished) by methods which

are intolerable to those who care for liberty, and even today, if we
seek a perfect example of 'fair shares for all', we will find it, not
in the latest Peoples' Republic, but in prison institutions the world
over.
The social frameworks of the past, in which each man had his
recognised position, had already degenerated in Europe long
before the French Revolution ushered in a new age, but to con-
demn a principle because certain of its manifestations have suf-
fered the process of decay to which all things are prone is neither
wise nor objective.
Gustave Thibon, saved by his peasant background from the
maintained
illusions either of the bourgeoisie or of the proletariat,
that such frameworks functioned as protective shells and believed
that the human personality developed more freely and with greater
individuality (taking this term in its positive sense) within their
shelter than in any amorphous society. To the contemporary mind,
mention of social hierarchies calls up a vision of the impoverished
and enslaved masses created by nineteenth century industrialism
and of ruthless mine-owners and the like but that was, precisely,
;

a society in which traditional frameworks were being broken down

in the industrial interest so that the machines might be fed.
Whatever we may think of the more ancient social patterns, one
thing is certain they stood in the way of industrialism and of the
:

methodical exploitation of human material, and they were destroy-

ed for this reason. There was no revelation of a new and higher
morality, no dawning of an age of reason after a long night of
superstition only the command from our ironmongery, 'Feed
;

me !' and the quick response, 'We obey !'.

It rather seems as though machines require of us an egalitarian
and fluid social structure, whereas men, left to their own devices,
had found that quite a different kind of structure best served their
needs. The acceptance of the inequalities inherent in the frame-
work depended, no doubt, upon a faith or a certainty (as the case

84
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
might be) which placed this network of pre-determined social
relationships in a far wider context. Terrestrial man was principally
concerned with his extra-terrestrial destiny and saw his life as an
episode which could never be judged in isolation. From this he
derived a contentment which the modern age despises. The
avowed aim of revolutionaries and of many national leaders in the
newly independent countries has been to destroy this contentment
and to make unacceptable what was formerly accepted a curious ;

ambition, perhaps, for men of unquestionable integrity to set

themselves. They believed, of course, that a more rational con-
tentment would be achieved when the old, millennial order had
been replaced by a new system devised by some solitary theorist
in his study or in the Reading Room of the British Museum
they were contemptuous of 'pie in the sky' and proposed, instead,
'pie' on earth for our remote descendants at some indefinite time

in the unforeseeable future.

Meanwhile, far from abolishing inequalities, egalitarianism has,
at least for the time being, exposed them more ruthlessly than ever
before. There no doubt, many people who feel no compulsion
are,
to enter the 'rat race' and prefer to cultivate a modest garden, but
the pressures which compel participation are becoming increasingly
—
powerful and it is, in any case, the racers and not the gardeners
who shape the kind of world in which we shall all have to live.
The law of the jungle, now euphemistically described as
'equality of opportunity', has replaced the human artifice which
was designed to exclude and
a man's position, whether in capital-
it,

ist determined by the practical talents with

or socialist countries, is

which he happens to have been endowed (as, under different

conditions, he might have been endowed with inherited wealth)
or, quite simply, by his strength and his cunning. The Marxist
regards this as an intermediate stage and looks forward to the true
egalitarianism of a communist society but the fact that the Soviet
;

Union, sixty years after the Revolution, does not even pretend to
be appreciably closer to achieving communism suggests that
intermediate stages can last, in human terms, for a very long time.
One may be forgiven for wondering if this particular egg will ever
hatch. In the meantime, those societies in which the old hier-
archies have been destroyed are inevitably dominated by the
power struggle, and failure to hold one's own in this struggle is
taken as an indication of irremediable inferiority.

85
 KING OF THE CASTLE
There were no such failures in the ancient hierarchical societies.
Within the social context, men were not expected to move out of
the position in which destiny had placed them at birth and the
majority could get on with the business of living free from the
compulsions of ambition (since no structure of this kind is com-
pletely rigid, those who nonetheless felt a compulsion to move
upwards frequently found the means of doing so). But in the
religious context, which seemed of infinitely greater importance,
no bounds or limits were set even for the humblest of men, and in
this case success did not depend upon wealth or talents, ruthless-
ness or luck.
The poorest man and the least educated could hope to attain to a
state of vision and, indeed, of being compared with which all the
king's goldand women were trash. No human soul, whatever the
circumstances of his birth and whatever his handicaps, could be
denied the opportunity of coming as close to the supreme prize as
love and longing might take him; and this was a high place in
which there was room for all comers.
The pursuit of relative good, mistaken for an absolute, has
carried us a long way from the ancient patterns and from the
social stabilitywhich is now so quaintly dismissed as a condition
of 'stagnation' (as though our present frenetic agitation were an
indication of clarity and lucidity). Deriving on the one hand from
a naive hope of building heaven on earth and, on the other, from
—
envy on the part of those who deprived of any true dream of
—
heaven cannot bear to see others enjoy what escapes their own
grasp, egalitarianism has created atomised societies which provide
no defence against the reduction of human beings to the status of
human material. Castle walls have crumbled and the swarming
people of the flatlands are left unprotected and yet none of this
;

has happened without our consent and, in many cases, our busy
and conscientious cooperation. It is we who change, not the condi-
tions which define the possibilities of human living, and those who
choose to look the other way when decisions are to be made and
who obey the laws of men as though they were the laws of God
have no real grounds for complaint.
It could be said that they have lost the animal's alert and watch-
ful cunning without having achieved the vigilance of man's estate.
If their worldly business occupies them to the exclusion of the
'remembrance of God', it diverts them also from paying attention
86
 LIBERTY AND OBEDIENCE
to dangers which surround them on the earthly level ;
they are, in
Muslim terms, ghdfilun twice over, careless not only of their
ultimate good but also of their present safety.
It is worth recalling yet again the saying of Plotinus that bad
men rule through the feebleness of the ruled and that this is just.
Liberty in the political realm is a privilege of the strong and the
watchful. In periods of stability weakness may go unscathed, but in
changing times, when everything is in the melting pot, no one can
afford to walk unarmed or to be unobservant of the undergrowth.
Peace is elsewhere. In this place and at this time we are all frontiers-
men.
 MAN IN SOCIETY

Liberty in the social and political realm necessarily shares in the

contingent character of all those relative goods which we overrate
or underrate according to the current climate of opinion. In this
realm there are no 'absolutes' everything is a question of balance
:

and discrimination between the relatively important and the

relatively unimportant. But there are circumstances in which the
protection of some relative good becomes, as it were, the pre-
condition for preserving something that is good in an absolute and
timeless sense. The relative then takes its colouring from the
principle which it protects.
Men were certainly not 'free', in the sense in which freedom is
now understood, in the ancient traditional societies, theocratic or
tribal.Their lives were conditioned from the cradle to the grave
by patterns of belief and of behaviour which had been laid down
either from the beginning of time or else from the moment when
a divine Revelation (reaching the earth through a Prophet, a chosen
Messenger) provided a whole sector of humanity with the informa-
tion they required for their livingand for their dying. In these
circumstances they needed no other liberty: 'The Truth shall make
you free*.
This point may be illustrated in terms of the following image
suppose the world to be a vast expanse spread out beneath the
divine Sun, but with a heavy canopy of cloud over many areas.
The sun's rays will strike the earth at certain specific points,
creating by their inherent power patterns which preserve the
quality of radiance even whenclouds pass over. Those who live
at one such point, having access to the light, do not need to move
from where they are but those in darkness will die there, chilled
;

to the marrow, unless they are free to move on and seek the light
in solitary pilgrimage.
The liberty with which we are concerned might therefore be

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 MAN IN SOCIETY

defined as freedom of movement within areas of darkness ; the

greater the darkness, the higher the priority assigned to such liberty.
We —
have not yet become accustomed as we now must to the —
fact that under conditions of swift and radical change, involving
the breakdown of the ancient structures created for our protection,
priorities are no more stable than the circumstances to which they
relate.
Confusion arises because we have turned our backs upon the
very notion of absolute principles which determine the placing of
good and relative evil in an unalterable scale of value. It
all relative

no longer seems possible to assess the legitimacy or otherwise of

any particular political authority or social pattern; people know
—
only what they 'like' and what they 'dislike' the agreeable and the
disagreeable —
and this provides a notoriously uncertain standard of
judgment. Without some notion of legitimacy it is impossible to
make valid judgments in the political realm or, for example, to
determine when obedience to authority is a virtue and when it is a sin.
Since, until so recently, men's ideas were determined by religion,
it is only in the religious context that we can expect to find a
definition of legitimacy as it has been understood through the ages.
In this context it can be related to a very simple principle no man
:

worships another of his kind, no man bows down before another of

his kind, no man gives unquestioning obedience to another of his
kind. There is only one Divinity, one Master, one Ruler; and such
is the nobility of our human estate that we can accept no other.

Such is the principle. Its applications, in the opaque and ambi-

guous situation of fallen man, are of an almost incalculable variety.
We do not live in the light of heaven or in intimate contact with
absolute principles, but in the midst of reflections and the reflec-
tions of reflections. Throughout recorded history men have in fact
obeyed others of their kind, bowed down before them and, on
occasion, worshipped them. But, in so doing, they have submitted,
not to the man as such in his human poverty and imperfection, but
to the Divinity which — —
by his function he represents and sym-
bolises in the tattered dress of his transient identity. It might be
said that the traditional ruler was transparent (or assumed to be so)
and that, through him, his subjects glimpsed the true object of their
worship and their obedience. The notion of an earth entirely cut
off from heaven or of a bubble isolated by its opaqueness from
everything outside would have been unimaginable to them.

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
An example may be taken from a culture which has commonly
been regarded as 'irreligious', as indeed it must appear if we confine
ourselves strictly to the perspective of Semitic monotheism. In
ancient China all authority flowed from the Emperor and his realm
was known as the Middle Kingdom, being situated at the centre of
the earth and therefore directly beneath the light of heaven. But
who was this Emperor ? A man of no consequence, except for one
thing he had received the Mandate of Heaven he was an open
; ;

channel between what is above and what is beneath and, as such, he

maintained the world in existence by his mere presence, as does the
sun by its simple shining. In ceremonial dress, he was clothed in
symbols which were like so many messages from heaven to earth ;

his actions and even his gestures were regulated by rites which
conveyed a heaven-sent pattern to all his people, and the celestial
Empire was preserved by his ritual circumambulation of the Ming
Tang, which was an image of the entire universe.
Bordering that Empire, in Tibet, the Dalai Lama was the channel
through which the grace of the Boddhisattva Chenrezig flowed out
to all his people, while around him the great monasteries were set
like fires— —
domestic hearths of divinity at which mountain travel-
lers in that bare land warmed themselves. Their destruction by the
Communists was like the encroachment of a new ice age.
The Japanese Emperor's authority, on the other hand, was
hereditary and rested upon his descent through Jimmu Tenno from
the solar goddess, Amaterasu-Omikami, and his title was 'The
Sublime Gate' (Mikado) a gate, a door, a way-in, a way-out. In
:

other words, he was the opening in the wall, but for which the
Japanese race would have suffocated in this narrow world. In quite
another setting (such is the richness of human possibility) the
divinity of the Pharaoh was not doubted in ancient Egypt and even
;

the Romans understood that their sometimes clownish Emperors

—
must be 'deified 'if they were to merit obedience for who but a
slave would obey a merely human master ? Elsewhere and in every
racial setting, tribal Chieftains decked in heavenly symbols which
showed the nature of their authority and its source wore the cloaks
or head-dress of majesty and so brought life to their people, fruitful-
ness to the fields and order out of chaos.
In the Indo-European world, where society was organised into
a hierarchy of castes, there was a division of powers, but the temporal
authority operated only by virtue of a legitimacy conferred upon it

90
 MAN IN SOCIETY

from above. The Hindu kshatriya, the kingly man, would have been
a creature raging in darkness had he not received the gift of light
through the brahmin caste, just as the moon is illuminated by the
sun. On the European side of the fence, the Emperor was crowned
by the Pope, the Vicar of Christ, but for which his commands would
have been meaningless and no warrior would have taken the field
;

without priestly blessing. Such societies as these were like vast

irrigation systems grace was poured out upon the spiritual
:

authority and, by descending steps, flowed down to the knight, the

merchant and the common man. It is always the same story, what-
ever the cultural variations. An opening above — a breach or window
in the carapace, —the influx of light, and then a man or men or a

caste existing only to disseminate this light without which the

people would be blind as worms.
Any one of these sacred societies —each of them unique — might
seem narrow and partial if it is considered in isolation. Each deve-
loped certain human possibilities to the exclusion of others which
have an equal right to flower in the light of day. But this is what
limitation means, and life in the human form is synonymous with
limitation. Each saw its own social and moral pattern as reflecting a
heavenly order or a God-given Norm and found in this belief the
justification and support for its way of life; but the traditional
doctrines do not admit of the possibility of any single, definitive and
entirely adequate reflection of this Norm on the level of space and
time it is reflected only in fragmentary forms and therefore in a
;

diversity of what appear to be mutually contradictory systems.

Wholeness is expressed through variety and in manifestations
which, although they may appear to compete, are in truth com-
plementary. However narrow they might seem, none was in fact a
closed system they were comparable to the divergent 'perspectives'
;

of those who observe the mountain from different points of view.

At the same time, while no single society could ever incarnate the
Norm in its totality or exhaust its possibilities, the individual man
making use of a limited perspective as his starting point —contained
the capability of advancing until he achieved knowledge of the
mountain as it is, in all its plenitude. The traditional wisdom to
which we are heirs recognises this knowledge, vision or state of
being as true and unqualified liberty, far beyond the realm of
contingency and the limited freedom attainable within the bounds
of the contingent.

9i
 KING OF THE CASTLE
Even within these bounds, however, there was usually a readiness
to accept certain 'eccentrics' as entitled to exemption from the local
norms of human behaviour, and many of these societies permitted
the periodic destruction of their framework through a reversal of
the normal order of things. Such a reversal might take place at the
New Year, when the old world had come to an end and the new
world was yet to be born, and conventions were turned topsy-
turvy as a reminder that all human values are relative, just as the
medieval Court Jester reminded the men of power that their power
was only local and their glory transient. All things were then cast
back, as it were, into the primordial times before social frameworks
were made. There were other renewals which took place constantly
each birth, each marriage and each death represented a break in the
normal time process, an end and a beginning, through which the
fabric of creation was perpetually renewed.
Ours, in comparison, is a weary world, and the variety which
compensates for the narrowness of any single human culture is fast
disappearing from the face of the earth. Soon a man will run to some
far corner and find there the same perspective, the same thoughts,
the same environment. Seeking the unaccustomed which, in its
subjective impact, can be like a vision of heaven, he will find same-
ness. The dissemination over the entire surface of the earth of a
single civilisation, although this was same
inevitable as soon as the
industrial techniques and an became
identical climate of opinion
universal, reduces the human picture to monochrome. There are
those who monochromatic humanity will, in effect,
believe that a
have lost its raison d'etre and must therefore have reached the end
of the road. Uniformity, they say, is not what we were made for
and nothing that departs entirely from the purpose of its creation
either can or should survive.

Such ideas are strange to the people of our time and seem far
removed from what is thought of as 'common sense'. It is difficult
even to find a true sceptic, that is to say someone who doubts doubt
itself and therefore keeps an open mind when he is faced with what

— —
seems to him in terms of his conditioning improbable, if not
impossible.
The remains that throughout the greater part of recorded
fact
history —and, no doubt, far beyond that limited area of knowledge
— these were the ideas upon which men and women, shaped like

92
 MAN IN SOCIETY

ourselves both in body and in mind, based their understanding of

the human situation and, in particular, of 'legitimacy' in the political
realm. That they should have come to seem not merely 'irrational'
but unthinkable is a measure of the strength of the countervailing
force which, in traditional terms, belongs to the realm of darkness,
decay and disintegration, and which has transformed human
thinking in a very short space of time.
We cannot reverse the course of history or pretend to be other
than we are but we do well to
; register the fact that better men than
ourselves believed these things and, having done so, to look more
critically than we commonly do at the assumptions taken for granted
in our age.
It would be easier to do this if our view of the past were less
partisan. Although historians may strive after objectivity, they are
necessarily men of their time and men of a specific cultural heredity.
Quite apart from the bias imposed by the Christian legacy, with its
emphasis upon a once and once only divine Revelation, belief in
progressive evolution (itself a kind of projection of the Christian
hope onto a two-dimensional surface) makes it extremely
flat,

an ancient culture otherwise than in

difficult for scholars to assess
terms of this belief, while exploitation in the industrial interest
during the past two centuries has soured our whole view of the past.
Even if it were possible for him to be more objective and less —
concerned with dates to the exclusion of timeless factors the —
secular historian is necessarily concerned only with externals and
the drama of events. The spiritual life of peoples what one might —
figuratively call the extra-terrestrial dimension of their lives
largely escapes his attention, running as it does in channels quite
different to those of politics, social conditions and all the events
that make headlines for the historian as they do for the journalist.
There is an open history and there is, as it were, a secret history;
these two may move in opposite directions.
The story of Islam during the five centuries following the death
of the Prophet provides an example of just such a contrast : out-
wardly, dissension and heroic conflict between noble but head-
strong men in the midst of a religious and political expansion which
carried the armies of thenew Empire into France in the West and
China in the East, followed by dynastic quarrels, division in the
'seamless garment' of the dar-ul-Islam, and all the sad disillusion-
ments which are inseparable from the political realm inwardly, ;

93
 KING OF THE CASTLE
a quiet flowering of spirituality and profound commerce between
heaven and earth against a background of sober and humane equi-
librium achieved in societies in which every action and every
relationship was shaped by the religion. This is a secret history
which leaves behind it neither monuments nor scars. In the long
run it is the only history that matters.
But in the ancient traditional societies these two strands of
history were not separated outward events made sense only in
:

terms of their inward significance, trivial in themselves, yet signi-

ficant in so far as they exteriorised spiritual truths; and in the
political realm, which could not be isolated from the realm of
meaning, the ruler was the man from outside our bubble, the herald
of eternity in the shifting sands of time.
We shall not even begin to understand such societies unless we
look for what liesunder the shell of historical events. The contrast
between their order of priorities and ours can scarcely be over-
stated. As a contemporary writer on Tibet, which was the last of
the major traditional societies to be destroyed by the forces govern-
ing the modern world, has pointed out, the very things which seem
to us most 'real' and most 'necessary' were, for the Tibetans, if not
quite illusory, only of secondary importance, while the things which
they, for their part, regarded as primary realities 'are for the

—
majority of our people, including the highly educated perhaps for
—
them most of all either all but non-existent or ascribable to a
twilight realm of subjective imaginings'.*
How can any man whose mind is seized and possessed by the
opinions and prejudices of our time ever hope to understand
societies in which the order of human priorities was not merely
different but totally reversed and, in our terms, 'upside-down'?
Perhaps our present situation (and the illusion we have of intellec-
tual clarity) might be illustrated by the lettering on a large packing-
case seen on an English station platform a few years ago: 'In order
to avoid confusion, the bottom is labelled top.' If this rather
mysterious piece of information were taken seriously, it might help
us to understand a great deal about the modern world.
The more ancient the traditional society, the more distorted is
we are likely to have of it, indeed the historical evidence
the view
upon which to found any view at all is sparse, and it could be said
that the more excellent a human society, the thinner the evidence it
* The Way and the Mountain: Marco Pallis (Peter Owen Ltd), p. 105.

94
 MAN IN SOCIETY

leaves behind it in the historical record. 'Happenings' are, almost by

definition, crimes or disasters, as every newspaper reader knows,
and very little happened in these societies. The historian therefore
tries to reconstruct them in terms of what is more familiar to him
and decadence in one shape or another.
this, inevitably, is

The tide which, according to the almost universal belief of our

ancestors, leads inexorably towards the end of time and the closing
—
of this human cycle may pause now and then and there are always
surface eddies which give the impression that the flow is advancing
—
rather than receding but it cannot be reversed. As in so many
other contexts, modern ideas about the nature of time present an
inverted image of ancient thought, rather as though everything
were perceived through a convex lens for us the 'bottom' is always
;

labelled 'top', and every descent is seen as an ascent.

This is not the place to consider in detail the traditional doctrine
of cycles, in terms of which humanity was believed to pass through
four great ages, drifting from the dawn-grandeur of the Golden
Age, when the human creature spoke familiarly with his Creator,
to the lengthening shadows of the Age of Iron. But no one can
—
doubt that the ancient traditional societies whether in the form of
Hindu civilisation or of tribal cultures —have drifted downstream
in the course of timeand were (with rare exceptions, of which the
North American Indians provide a possible example) already
decadent before the impact of European conquest shattered their
life-patterns. One symptom of this decadence was the fading into
the remote distance of the very idea of a Supreme Being, the fore-
ground being taken over by 'divine energies' or 'angelic powers'
personified as 'gods' ; in other words, the descent into polytheism
and idolatry.
Another symptom was the ever increasing division between the
idea of divine Kingship and its earthly realisation, until the gap
became so glaringly obvious that it could no longer be papered over
and the very principle that all authority derives from above began
to look like a fiction. The historian, considering this principle in the
light of his progressive scenario, thinks atonce of the degenerate
examples immediately available to his inspection and assumes that
matters have always been so, forgetting that the fiction the —
—
degenerate form exists only as the echo or parody of a truth.
The fact remains that a descent has taken place and that societies
in which the presiding idea has faded almost out of sight are

95
 KING OF THE CASTLE
extremely vulnerable, requiring, not a wind of change, but a mere
breeze to reduce the ancient and hallowed framework to dust. As in
the familiar fairytale, a child cries out that the King is naked and

immediately the whole crowd is aware of the fact. No one any

longer understands how they could have supposed that this forked
radish, a man like themselves, was robed in splendour.
This is an inevitable process, but in Biblical terms it marks a
kind of second 'Fall of Man'. By the first Fall he had been expelled
from Paradise and, thereafter, had attempted to reproduce in the
wilderness the conditions of the remembered Garden and to retain
some of its habits. Eventually — the wilderness
since, after all, not is

the Garden and never can be —memory fades and practice decays
swept away and we find ourselves on our
until the last vestiges are
own in falling darkness and increasing cold. At the same time, if the
primal Fall was identified with the Knowledge of Good and Evil,
the second implies the loss of this discriminative knowledge and
the substitution for it of ideas of good and evil.

With this second fall humankind enters a new era, one in which
there can no longer be any legitimate authority in the traditional
sense. Wholly secular societies come into being.
Although there have been occasions on which the ancient,
heaven-oriented society collapsed or was destroyed overnight, the
process is usually more gradual, and there are cases in which certain
traditional values
—
'habits of Paradise' —
are honoured long after
the social structure has changed beyond recognition. Such vestiges
may survive for centuries after the metaphysical and religious ideas
which validate them have been forgotten, like cut flowers preserved
after the parent plant has died. The situation is therefore exceedingly
complex and, when the channels between heaven and earth have
been silted up, we make do with the bad as the only available
alternative to the worse, groping for a sense of priorities in the
midst of a chaos which changes shape as do clouds on a windy day.
Under these circumstances the preservation of what little can be
salvaged from the wreck becomes immensely important. Ancient
principles, no longer understood, come to be regarded as fictions,
but even such fictions, if they preserve an order which still protects
and nourishes men, leaving them free to discover individually the
sources of splendour long after their society has lost sight of those
sources, are not to be scorned. Poised between two poles on the —
one hand the traditional societies in their pristine integrity and, on

96
 MAN IN SOCIETY

the other, the totalitarian secular society from which every glimmer
of light has been finally excluded —there lies a kind of neutral
territory,ambiguous by nature, neither one thing nor the other,
closed above but not yet open below to the invasion of demonic and
dehumanising forces.
This is, almost by definition, a perilous situation, for nature is
said to abhor a vacuum and, when images of a heavenly order are
banished, images from quite another place are ready to break in.

The world has become — to borrow C. S. Lewis's phrase —the

'silent planet', but such a closed system may at least provide a
framework in which men are free to look upwards and to seek their
salvation. Liberty to do so then takes its place at the head of any
realistic order of priorities.

The 'neutral' society is necessarily disorderly, illogical in its

structure, riddled with anomalies and, very possibly, tainted with
corruption. Having lost the heavenly order and, as yet, escaped the
deadly regimentation of the infernal host, it could hardly be other-
wise. There are many worthy people who find this intolerable and
would like to straighten the curves and iron out the bumps, creating,
they hope, a more 'rational' society but one does well to remember
;

that disorder is not the direct opposite of order. The opposite of a

heavenly order is its an infernal one. Between
inverted image :

these two lies the intermediate, neutral realm of confused disorder.

This may be denied in principle by those who place the peace and
good order of society at the head of their priorities, but it is known
well enough in practice. The 'lifer' in a high-security prison or the
inmate of a Siberian labour-camp would quite rightly prefer free-
dom even under chaotic and grossly unfair social conditions to his
present situation. A prisoner in his cell watching a bird's flight
beyond the bars does not see any moral or intellectual problem in
weighing the advantages of liberty against those of security. He is
up against the reality of the human situation. But when a man is

gradually, gently, lovingly imprisoned he neither sees nor seizes

the moment of choice. True of man in society, this is true also in an
infinitely wider context for it is said that a moment comes for each
;

of us in this brief life when we choose, for perpetuity, our domicile

inheaven or in hell.
Order in the social realm is a relative good of great importance.
We would all of us, no doubt, prefer to combine liberty with order
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 KING OF THE CASTLE
in a reasonable balance rather than find ourselves obliged to choose
between the two, and there is nothing wrong in wanting to enjoy
simultaneously as many good things as can cohabit under the same
roof. The problem arises when two or more of these good things are
found, in practice, to be mutually irreconcilable, and it is in this
situation that a scale of priorities must be established.
How, then, are we to distinguish —in the context of 'neutral*
societies lacking —
any supernatural sanction between the social
order which offers a sound support for human living and one which
threatens to suffocate the very qualities which make us distinctively
human ? First, surely, by facing the facts squarely and recognising
that the feelings aroused by a sacred, traditional authority and
the loyalty it evokes are inappropriate in relation to the secular
State.
Since it is not in our interest to tear one another to pieces and
since survival in this world requires at least a measure of coopera-
tion, some kind of social framework has to be devised and some kind
of central authority must exist. But in seeking support and protec-
tion from the State or from society as such we are dealing with a
dangerous beast and have to be ever watchful that its protective
embrace does not tighten into a bear-hug. The danger of being
hugged to death is the price we pay for security, a fact recognised
clearly enough by political thinkers in the late eighteenth as in the
nineteenth century, but commonly overlooked in our more 'ideal-
istic' times. The rights of the State over us and its claims upon us

diminish in proportion to its loss of traditional legitimacy. When it

no longer acknowledges any transcendent authority, it must become
our servant, providing protection and certain amenities a kind of —
glorified Water and Sewerage Authority.
At best, the secular State will provide a loose framework in which
men and women can realise their possibilities or, as the Scots say,
'dree their own weird' and make their choice. Far from taking upon
itself the responsibilities which previously rested on individual

shoulders, it will leave them where they belong and strive to create
conditions under which the exercise of personal responsibility is
encouraged and, so far as possible, facilitated.
Towards the end of the last war, both Gustave Thibon and his
former protegee, Simone Weil, set themselves to draw up the out-
kind of society that should be built in France when peace
lines of the
— —
came. Both were realists anti-Utopians and both understood

98
 MAN IN SOCIETY

the importance of binding social obligations to the normal impulses

of men and women, not as they should be, but as we find them.
'Cut off from self-interest,' wrote Thibon, Virtue loses the weight
by which it is incarnated nothing binds it any longer to the earth.
;

But self-interest, in its turn, separated from virtue, loses the power
of flight which is its deliverance there is no longer anything to
;

raise it to heaven. This is the divorce between the ideal and the
real: on the one hand a verbal and inoperative morality, on the
other an anarchic swarming of unbalanced egoisms which devour
one another, with, as an inevitable result, the degradation of indi-
viduals and the dissolution of societies.'* He knew only too well
how distant were the societies which he saw around him from this
sober and realistic pattern of living. The Christian of the Middle
Ages, he said, knew but one real enemy individual sin. 'Today we
:

have to do battle against a more universal and tenacious evil,

against a disorder that has infiltrated into our bodies, our customs,
our institutions, mixed with the very air we breathe.'
Society petrifies and the atmosphere is poisoned unless it has in
its midst men who, by their very presence, let in a breath of fresh
air ; men who exercise a responsibility rooted in values deeper and
more universal than any which can take shape within the matrix of
the world's business, more central and more nearly absolute than
those of morality. Frameworks, outside the sacred realm, are always
makeshifts ;
they are vivified and validated by men who, while they
live their everyday lives within these bounds, have their hearts
elsewhere. Such men do not make their appearance by command
of the Government or because the planners have done their job w ell ;

they belong to the realm of the wayward and the unpredictable (for
so it is that the extra-terrestrial, the spiritual, appears to us), and
society must contain wide areas of freedom to accommodate them.
—
On a lower level and a purely contingent one this time the —
air circulates more freely if there is space for privileged groups, able

to pursue unproductive and seemingly frivolous occupations, to

explore by-ways which are closed to the busy majority, to indulge
in fantasies and play with dreams, to mock those who take their
social role seriouslyand to defy practicality; people, in other words,
who introduce an element of variety into closed societies which
would otherwise degenerate into total uniformity, and who suggest
alternative perspectives. The citizens of a secular society, ground
* Retour au Reel: Gustave Thibon (Lardanchet), p. 161.

99
 KING OF THE CASTLE
down by economic pressures, constantly reject 'inessentials' (under-
stood in an exclusively material sense) and narrow their field of
attention, like cattle concerned only with the patch of grass imme-
diately ahead. Then, since they are not in fact cattle, the air becomes
fetid unless their world is ventilated by men and women who are
not of their kind.
It is no doubt inevitable that the 'neutral' society should tend
towards uniformity, as though dragged downwards by the force of
gravity. Variety in the human realm reflects the inexhaustible
richness inherent in the light of heaven, and once this light is

excluded a process of impoverishment sets in. Variety, which is not

subject to numbering since it is expressed in unique entities, is
increasingly replaced by sheer quantity, a quantity without signi-
ficance or value since the units of which it is composed are inter-
changeable.
It was once a grave matter to destroy a man, for he was irreplace-
able in his uniqueness ; the destruction of a unit of the multitude is

clearly unimportant, a fact which the great collectivist societies of

our century have quite logically recognised. Equally logically,
having lost the very concept of individual uniqueness and of the
value which resides in this man or that woman made 'in the image
of God they have been compelled to seek value elsewhere and have
5

found it in the collectivity as such, in the 'masses' or the 'people'

and from this point on the sacrifice of the individual to the collec-
tivity can always be justified.
The neutral society is, as it were, poised over this abyss and drawn
towards it, existing only as a transitional stage between the integral,
traditional society living in the light of heaven (however narrow the
lens through which that light is filtered) and the totalitarian collec-
tivity which is, in a certain sense, its reversed image or parody.
It is not surprising that we should have a profound, albeit
unconscious, nostalgia for the unity of the traditional societies and
therefore be willing enough to seek social homogeneity at a lower
level, if necessary a sub-human level —
the homogeneity of the herd
or the ant-heap. The nostalgia for unity finds at least a kind of
satisfactionin societies in which the individual is completely
absorbed into the mass, a mass that lives only to labour and to
spawn. One need not quarrel with those who claim that people are
happier so, particularly if they are better fed, better housed and
better clothed; but quarrel one must with the implication that

ioo
 MAN IN SOCIETY

happiness on this level is all that matters. Here, as in many other

contexts, believerand unbeliever part company, and there is no
—
common ground upon which dialogue or even argument might —
be possible. These are, indeed, mortal enemies, engaged in a fight
to the death.
Those who understand how important it is that such small areas
of freedom as remain unenclosed in the modern world should be
defended at all costs and for as long as defence is humanly possible
need not be dismayed by the fact that they are probably fighting a
losing battle. Temporary good is always worth defending because
nothing under the sun lasts for long and nothing is final, except for
one thing the choice which this individual man or woman makes
:

when the battle lines are drawn up. It is not for earthly victory or
for the 'future of humanity' that we fight, but for our own justifica-
tion. We play our parts on a very small stage set in a vast amphi-
theatre, and although —having done the little that is in our power
we may fall, defeated and overwhelmed, we can be sure that powers
infinitely greater than any at our command will break in upon the
'silent planet' when the time is ripe and that the forces which seemed
invincible will show themselves to have been no more substantial
than the vapours of night when the sun rises.
It is not, therefore, our business to enquire for how long the
sand-castles we build will last, or to reject joy because
sooner or —
later—sorrow suppose ourselves
will intervene, or, for that matter, to
so grand that we can only defend a city which will endure for ever.
Our business is with the present moment,, choosing the brief good
which reflects an everlasting Good, and with the preservation of
what is worth preserving for the time being. But we can never hope
to do this on a basis of wishful thinking or sentimental illusions.
Just as constant attentiveness to God is the foundation of all
religious practice, so a sober realism —attentive to facts — is the
foundation of effective action in the world. The defender must study
the weaknesses of the city he defends and know the condition of its
ramparts.

The people of the relatively free 'neutral' societies which still

survive in the modern world slumber upon their freedoms, chiefly

concerned with economic pressures and with the revamping of their
social frameworks in terms of current theories of 'progress' and
'equality'. They believe that democratic forms of government in

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
some way guarantee the preservation of liberty and that all the other
safeguards once thought necessary can be carelessly discarded so
long as free elections are allowed to take place at regular intervals.
This is, to say the least of it, a very dubious proposition, assuming,
as it must, that a majority of the electorate at any given time is more

concerned with the preservation of individual liberty than with

bread-and-butter problems. But there is a certain historical irony in
the fact that the very circumstances which make it essential that
people should have some real and effective control over their own
affairs tend to make such control almost impossible.
In the traditional societies, which changed so little from one
century to the next, the individual was protected by immemorial
customs and by a social pattern which was thought to be inalterable.
His rulers were equally bound by custom, their power strictly
limited, and they too were unlikely to dream of innovation. There
was no need for 'democracy' as it is now understood and yet, in so
;

many of these societies, democracy did exist in a very practical

form as, for example, in the African tribal system. Even in these
collectivist times this principle may be seen at work in a few tiny
communities here or there. The Western Samoans, on attaining
independence, chose their own ancient matai system in preference
to parliamentary government, a system under which the franchise
is confined to the Chiefs of the landholding clans, Chiefs who are

themselves elected by all their clan fellows, including the women

and the children. Such cases as this exist only on the margin of our
juggernaut world (with its cargo of false deities), but they illustrate
certain possibilities which are still viable.
In the conditions of swift change under which we now live
neither rulers nor ruled are either bound or protected by any serious
consideration beyond current fashions in opinion. Decisions are
taken and new laws introduced which may transform the individual's
life in a very short space of time, so that he and his family and his

work can be fitted into the latest scheme for collective development.
He needs as never before to have a hand on the levers of power or,
at the very least, to be in a position to obstruct the rash and hasty
manipulation of these levers and yet, because of the complexity of
;

modern civilisation and the organisational problems posed by

industrial societies, government cannot operate effectively unless it
is free from such interference and obstruction.

In this context, Thibon noted an important distinction between

102
 MAN IN SOCIETY

'platonic' power and real power, 'platonic' liberties and real

liberties or, in other words, between the theoretic and the effective.
The voting ticket, he said, 'has flowered on the tomb of the
communal and corporative liberties.' Universal adult suffrage has
been substituted for a network of local privileges and communal
freedoms for who, it is asked, needs such privileges and liberties
;

when he enjoys the right to vote ?

The 'masses' as such can never possess or wield power. When the
cake of power is divided between the units which make up the mass
one is left with crumbs invisible to the naked eye. What people need
is not a theoretic 'sovereignty', but real power on a small scale and

real protection against those who operate on a big scale the kind —
of power that can be handled and that feels good and solid in the
hand, not the kind that exists only in terms of statistics and electoral
majorities. But to possess this they would have to emerge from the
'mass' and become people again, jealously guarding their obstruc-
tive (and 'unfair', because unequally distributed) liberties. No
modern State would such an untidy situation, and one is
tolerate
therefore compelled to ask whether we can afford the modern State,
not merely as it is now but as it is likely to be a few years or a few
decades from now.
It is not difficult to understand why this question is seldom asked.
Liberty, as it was understood in the decades preceding the First
World War, is not highly regarded now even in Western Europe,
and this is partly due to the social changes which have taken place in
recent years. Industrialism, as we have seen, created a new class of
people fitted to its needs a displaced and dispossessed proletariat.
:

Liberties cherished by the ruling class could mean little more to

them than did the liberties of the Athenian citizen to his slaves.
Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the British
experience. As the breeding-ground of the Industrial Revolution,
Britain suffered the side-effects of early industrial development
more acutely and more profoundly than any other country. When
the nineteenth century Prime Minister Disraeli wrote of the 'two
nations' he was not employing a figure of speech but identifying a
fact of life. These two nations had so little in common that they
might have been taken for different races. There was a ruling class,
with well-defined characteristics which are still sometimes thought
to represent the 'British character', and there was the labouring or
slave class, more or less invisible throughout most of the nineteenth
 KING OF THE CASTLE
century, with totally different characteristics. Events in the middle
years of the present century have, in effect, produced a complete
reversal of roles, and it is inevitable —
since such habits cannot be
shaken off in the course of a —
few decades that the class now in
control should retain something of the slave-mentality.
In Britain and elsewhere in Europe (where the contrast was less
acute owing to the survival of large agricultural, pre-industrial
communities) the enfranchisement of the masses and the triumph
of trade unionism have placed political and social power in the
hands of those who have no tradition of individualism and inde-
pendence, qualities which were ground out of them (and their
fathers and grandfathers before them) in the factories and which
they necessarily associate with their former masters and with the
whole scenario of industrial exploitation. These circumstances
fostered a collectivist mentality. Individual gestures of indepen-
dence came to be seen as the betrayal of the common cause. In the
power there could be no tolerance for the
trade unions' struggle for
man who broke ranks.
It would therefore be foolish to expect the masses (or their
leaders) in Western Europe to resist the trend of the times or to be
ready to sacrifice their newly acquired prosperity for the sake of
liberties they have never enjoyed and have never learned to value.
To say this is not to make a moral judgment but to register a fact.
A man is enslaved and ill-treated. In due course he is, if not gen-
uinely freed (for freedom is not a gift but a condition for which one
must be fit), presented with the keys of political power. How could
one expect that he would emerge as a man without a past?
The notion that universal adult suffrage in some way guarantees
the liberty of the individual is without foundation. Democracy and
the 'free society' may happen to coincide they are certainly not
;

synonymous terms. No one doubts that government with the

consent of most of the governed is preferable to government without
this consent having said this one has not really said very much, and
;

there is great danger in the complacent assumption that nothing

more needs to be said.
This was not an assumption made by the American Founding
Fathers when they drew up the Constitution of the United States.
However great the errors of the eighteenth century political philo-
sophers from the religious point of view, they understood the nature
of power a great deal better than their successors. In North America

104
 MAN IN SOCIETY

the men who had the unprecedented task of setting up a new kind of
society in a 'new world' understood very well that distrust plays a
vital and healthy role in the political realm. What they most
distrusted was the concentration of power in any single sector.
Quite unlike the revolutionaries either of France or of Russia,
who were primarily concerned to turn their societies upside down
and replace one form of unfettered power with another, the
Americans distrusted not only the 'insolence of the despot', but
also the 'insolence of the commonalty' or, to express this in con-
temporary terminology, the will of the people. It was almost as
though they possessed an intuitive awareness that, with the dis-
appearance of traditional authority, the first priority of the coming
age would be limitation of the power of the secular State. The
Constitution was designed to fetter power, in whatever quarter it
might erupt, in the expectation that it would always be abused if
unrestrained and that what they owed to future citizens of their
country was protection from this abuse.
No such protection exists in those democracies which make a
pseudo-absolute of the 'sovereignty of the people' (or of the people's
representatives in a parliamentary assembly). As was suggested
earlier, relative principles and values belong to the order of variable
priorities and present us with a mortal threat when they are treated
as 'absolutes' and one or another of them is given unqualified
priority. The American Constitution, in effect, limits the 'sove-
reignty of the people' in terms of Constitutional Law, just as it
limits the power of the Chief Executive and of the Congress.
The British example is again instructive in this context. It is
almost as though the introduction of universal adult suffrage,
combined with the sweeping aside of the checks and balances which
—
previously existed the Sovereign's effective power of veto and the
blocking role of an hereditary Second Chamber had stifled real —
political debate except on the extreme Left, so that a nation which
produced some of the most notable political thinkers in Europe and
mounted the first modern revolution, under Cromwell and his
fellow regicides (a term which indicates the killing of a principle as
much as of a person), is now notorious for its people's indifference
to political philosophy and for the pragmatism of its governments.
At the same time, a concern for the liberty of the subject which
was once regarded by other Europeans as little short of fanatical has
been eroded in favour of something quite different, an obsession

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
with 'fairness* understood in a strictly quantitative sense, together
with an intense resentment of privilege in any form and a fanatical
rejection of the fact that some human beings are, by nature and by
destiny, superior to others. Vigilance in the cause of liberty has been
replaced by watchfulness of the neighbour who might steal a march
on us or jump the queue. This too is inevitable and has its origins
in the slave-barracks. Free men are not concerned with fairness.
They accept inequality. But slaves starve if one man seizes more
than his fair share of the crusts available. They must keep a jealous
eye on one another merely to survive and they must stand patiently
in the queue because that is what the system demands.
Equally inevitably, a reasonable principle the principle that —
governments should be guided by the wishes of the greater part of
the population they govern and should act for the common good
has been pursued beyond reason and has led to a situation in which
a notional majority of the electorate (which may in fact be a minority)
ispresumed to empower government to act without restraint.
This might not matter so much if modern governments exercised
only such functions as were considered their proper business a
century or more ago, but in our time government is omnipresent,
fingering every aspect of human life and assuming a vast array of
new responsibilities on the principle that human beings cannot be
trusted to look after themselves or their companions moreover, it ;

has adopted a fundamentally revolutionary role, arrogating to itself

the right to change the very structure of society.
In earlier times, men and women who were opposed to the ruling
ideology of their period might stand aside and go their way, grumb-
ling but uninvolved. They are now compelled, not only to accept
what is done in the name of a fictional majority, but to participate
and to contribute to it by their labour, like condemned men forced
to dig their own graves.
The enforced involvement of every citizen in the aims and
activities of their societyseems to be inseparable from any political
system which claims to execute the will of the people, in whatever
fashion this mysterious will may have been ascertained. It is signi-
ficant that military conscription was introduced for the first time by
the Revolutionary Government in France, fighting the first 'People's
War'. From this it was only a short step to the invention of another
new principle, nationalism (in the contemporary sense of the term),
which would in due course encourage men to commit, in the name

1 06
 MAN IN SOCIETY

of their nation, crimes which even the most vile among them would
have hesitated to commit for his own sake.
This packaging of humanity into separate national enclosures
has a neatness about it which appeals to the modern age and has
followed a predictable course from the days of free movement to
this present time in which people are effectively imprisoned within
arbitrary frontiers, if not by the building of walls or the laying of
barbed wire, then by a system of passports, currency restrictions
and work permits binding them to a particular area much as serfs
were once bound to their Lord's demesne. Marshalled in this
fashion into camps, with barriers set up, they are the more easily
managed, and the doctrine of 'national sovereignty', supposedly
handed down with the Tablets of the Law, assists the process.
Anyone or any group who seize power in a particular camp may do
as they please. As in Cambodia in 1976, they may slaughter a
million of their own people without anyone raising a finger to
interfere. In the community of nations theGood Samaritan has no
role to play,but the Pharisees are full of virtue.
Involvement in the society in which we are effectively imprisoned
is also enforced by systems of direct taxation which would have

been regarded as intolerable only a few years ago. Taxation in one

form or another has been with us for a very long time, but here, as
in other contexts, something that is in itself necessary takes on an
entirely new when pushed beyond a certain point. Apart
colouring
from the room for personal choice) which
indirect taxes (allowing
enabled governments to function in the past, the Muslim zakat
offers the best example of a direct levy designed to provide for the
poor and to enforce the community's responsibility for those of its
members who cannot fend for themselves or take care of their
dependents but there is a world of difference between such classic
;

levies or tithes —
forming part of a body of religious obligations
— and modern income-tax, designed on the one hand to transfer
responsibilities from the individual, the family or the community to
the State and, on the other, to alter relationships within society.
If one considers the direction in which
this points, the outcome
must be obvious. The region which individual choice is allowed
in
to operate —
the possibilities of variety created by differences of
—
choice are systematically narrowed. We come soon enough to a
society in which the small proportion of his earnings that a man is
allowed to spend freely is no more than 'pocket money' which will

107
 KING OF THE CASTLE
cover certain luxuries ; —
the necessities of life and many things
which earlier ages would never have thought of as necessities
being provided by the State, while the possibility of anyone achiev-
ing financial independence, whatever the sacrifices he may be
prepared to make, is completely removed. There is therefore a
reversion to the childhood situation security, but without choice
:

or responsibility and without the opportunity to demonstrate

either the good or the evil which characterises us. The world is then
no longer a stage upon which people show what they are made of,
but an asylum in which they are 'cared for' while they await the day
when, stripped, unsheltered and alone, they will come to judgment.
There are those who would say that some such system is necessary
and unavoidable in a complex and highly developed industrial
society, and —
in so far as advanced industrialism and liberty cannot
—
exist under the same roof they have a case. But the point of quite
particular significance is the way in which this system has come to
be taken for granted in the course of a few decades as though, like
the wind and the rain, it were a phenomenon of nature. People have
forgotten that in the last century brave men were prepared to go to
prison as a matter of principle rather than pay this tax, and the few
who now manage to evade it are commonly regarded, not as cham-
pions of liberty, but as scoundrels.
It is taken for granted that taxation should be levied as much for
politicaland ideological purposes as for fiscal ones, so that the man
who pays a large proportion of his income in taxation is not primarily
contributing to his country's needs, but is making a sacrifice in the
service of an idea to which he may be totally opposed. This is an
entirely new and unprecedented situation. The fact that it goes
virtually unchallenged is both strange and sinister, compelling us to
ask yet again how many things which would at present seem intoler-
able to us might be accepted without question within a few decades
or even sooner.
President Nyerere, the darling of Western liberals, remarked
recently that : 'Many people would prefer to be left alone ; we are
not going to leave them alone'. His words might be echoed by the
leaders of almost any modern State and express definitively the
way inwhich benevolent governments see their role and their
unquestioning faith that they have a right to draw every single
individual into the process of change, convinced that only the mad
or the wicked would want to stand out against this 'progress'.

1 08
 MAN IN SOCIETY

We have travelled a very long way in the short time since

Thoreau, the author of 'Walden', wrote 'That government is best
:

which governs least.' It is no longer necessary, as it was in the days

of open and unashamed tyranny, to impose control in the teeth of
hatred and opposition this can now be done in the name of social
;

morality and the public good. Secularism, the profane realm, has
become both so all-embracing and so overweaning that the religious
man might willingly stand aside and cultivate his modest garden in a
quiet place. This is barely possible anywhere and may soon be
impossible everywhere. In a certain sense his situation is comparable
to that of the early Christians, who asked only to be left free to
pursue the way of salvation, but who were dragged out of their
—
hiding places and martyred since their very existence challenged
—
the totalitarianism of pagan Rome until, having no alternative,
they destroyed the society which had tried to destroy them.
One does not look for a repetition of this miracle. In these 'latter
days' when the world's religions are, at least in the corporate sense,
advanced in age and far from the historic sources of their respective
Revelations, when Christianity slumbers on its world-transforming
truths and the hurricane force of Islam is long exhausted, no religion
as such is likely to stand firm against the claims of the secular State
and its pagan ideals.
—
Unavoidably for nothing under the sun is exempt from time
the Word of God, when it is fleshed in the forms of this world and
in human institutions, suffers an ageing process but, because it is ;

what it is, individuals may still reach the living marrow of these old
bones and, through this contact, be reborn into the primal age of
their religious traditions. This may not appear as a major factor
on the stage of world events, but it still represents a threat to
societies which have turned their backs on God and on the trans-
cendent dimension which would make nonsense of all their claims,
and for this reason if for no other they are bound to hate religion,
attacking it ruthlessly in the Socialist bloc and, elsewhere, either
seducing it to purely social purposes or smothering it in worldliness.
They have taken on a formidable opponent.

There is a kind of balance, a law of compensation, inherent in the

nature of things. Precisely because ours is the age of the masses and
of the collectivity, it is also the age of the individual. When all else

slips and slides away, only this man or this woman —the minority
109
 KING OF THE CASTLE
of one —can stand firm. It is, of course, an absurdity to suggest that
the average person should do so, setting himself up in proud and
solitary opposition to the multitude and pitting his judgment
against theirs ; but then it is quite impossible to tell who is 'average'
and who is not until the chips are down. Only dire necessity separates
the men from the boys.
Even so, the humble man will ask What fits me to make so :

momentous a decision?
In the first place, there is no one else to make it. In other times
men were encompassed in guidance and, indeed, in certainties. We
have chosen to live otherwise to 'think for ourselves' as the common
;

phrase has it, and to 'stand on our own feet' without the support of
immemorial custom, an unchanging morality, wise priests, a
religious framework, 'divine' rulers. We cannot now complain that
the responsibility placed upon us us too heavy to be borne and so ;

—
one says to this questioning man There is no one else to do it
only you. This is what we wanted, freedom from old hierarchies
and old dogmas, and our prayer has been answered. This man is
on his own.
Secondly, the convictions of the multitude are not so much true
convictions as mental and emotional habits, conditioned by a climate
of opinion which has no foundation beyond the sands of time. They
are the beliefs of non-believers and the thoughts of non-thinkers,
the parrot cries of a generation malformed by secular education and
mismoulded by an entirely profane human environment. It does
not really require undue pride or intellectual arrogance on the part
of those who have anchored their thought in a timeless and universal
wisdom to stand out against these pseudo-convictions. To say this
is not to denigrate modern man as such, at least in terms of his
potentialities, but to identify an unprecedented factor in his condi-
tion : unlike his fellows in any other period, he is bombarded from
infancy to old age, and through each day from morning to night,
with the ideas current at this moment in time. And yet this hubub
of propaganda can still be neutralised, as the roar of traffic is
neutralised for a man attentive to the business in hand, if he will but
listen to those other voices and attend to beliefs which are still filled

with a power which silences all such chatter.

The leaders of opinion in this age say that we are created chiefly
for the purpose of scratching one another's backs (being 'useful to
our society') monkeys do as much for each other. When the Muslim
;

no
 MAN IN SOCIETY

says that we are created to pray, not to work, he is simply marking

the distinction between man and beast and identifying the primary
human duty. Axiomatic in traditional thinking is the idea that the
animal creation imprisoned in time man is not.
is ;

There are many today who see more clearly than they know and
who would stand firm against the trend of the times if they were not
hamstrung by self-doubt. They are unsure of their own motives,
as they are of their own wisdom, browbeaten by the superficial
'common sense' of the age and intimidated by its humanitarian
pretentions. They should be aware that this humanitarianism is the
cheapest virtue available it costs absolutely nothing to express
;

liberal and humanitarian opinions, requires no sacrifices and wins

social approval. Put into practice, these opinions encourage the State
to take over responsibility for the poor, the weak and the unfor-
tunate ; once this has been achieved the virtuous man is justified in
feeling indignant when a friend or relative turns to him for help,
since they should have gone to the authorities and filled out the
appropriate forms. It is time to call the bluff of those who suggest
that anyone who opposes the fashionable ideology of 'social respon-
sibility' is showing a lack of concern for his neighbour, if not
'Hitlerite' tendencies.
No doubt Yeats had something of the sort in mind when he
wrote
'The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.'

For this reason, if no other, it is more than ever important to

proclaim the abnormality of the modern age and to unmask its
pretensions, assuring such doubters that it is not they but their
world which is sick and that the gift of health obliges them to
assume their responsibilities, not by rushing into action in company
with the professional busybodies, but by being themselves and by
achieving an integrity which rings true when struck by events. We
do not need to seek occasions for action they come to us, welcome
;

or unwelcome, and their coming is a sufficient sign that they are our
business.
Since it is in the Western sector of humanity that the modern age
came to birth, it is here if anywhere that the single man is required
to stand firm and question the ideologies of his time. Elsewhere in
the world, these ideologies are too novel and therefore too exciting

m
 KING OF THE CASTLE
to be doubted, and in any case they have the smell of success about
them they have the big bombs, the dams and the dam-busters.
;

But we are old in such ways and should by now be unimpressed by

the superstitions of progress, just as we are virtually immune to
certain diseases which, when first introduced into other regions of
the world, decimated whole populations.
Moreover the Westerner is well placed to show courage and take

risks. In material terms, he is supremely privileged, secure and

comfortable. His 'poor' are rich by Asian or African standards, his
belly is so regularly and amply filled that he forgets even to be
thankful for the miracle of nourishment few of his children die in
;

infancy and he himself has every prospect of living long enough to

repent of his sins. His anxieties relate, not to the necessities of
subsistence, but to luxuries and playthings. One can scarcely say
'noblesse oblige', for not even his best friends would call this man
noble, but he should at least acknowledge his exceptional good
fortune and the obligations which fortune imposes. Having no
excuse for the anxieties which drag a man's mind down to the
exigencies of survival, he is free to develop and use the specifically
human capacities he has been given and to seek Truth with unim-
peded purpose.
But good fortune is not confined to the level of material subsis-
tence.There is a more universal privilege which we all enjoy
regardless of our worldly situation, a privilege which motivates all
human praise and all gratitude. We have been born, not as beasts of
the field or the jungle, but as men and women capable of looking
beyond the exigencies of animal survival and of knowing, both
above and within all passing contingencies, the Absolute which is
both transcendent and present in the depths of our own being. The
means of salvation or of liberation are at hand on every side for, —
seen aright, there is no positive thing on this earth that cannot be a
means of salvation, a channel of grace, a reflection of reality
illuminated by the divine messengers, the prophets, who have told
us where to look and what to do.
From the moment of our birth into this human state —a state
'hard to obtain', as the Hindus say; immeasurably privileged in
comparison with the animal, vegetable and mineral states the —
Gates of Heaven are open. Capability implies obligation, and all
that has been said of human societies in the modern age might be
summarised in a few words whatever obstructs or inhibits this
:

112
 MAN IN SOCIETY

capability is damnable and merits destruction whatever fosters it

; is

blessed and has all the rights.

While, having been placed here, we are entitled to feel natural
concern over everyday problems on our own behalf and on that of
our kindred and our neighbours, this concern exists against a
background of thankfulness for good fortune which transient
difficulties and misfortunes cannot wholly obscure. A sense of
proportion is a human duty because it is something of which human
beings are capable. There is really no common measure between
time and eternity or between, on the one hand, the light and shade
of this life and, on the other, the joy which is the very substance
from which reality is woven. All that has been said of the social
realm and of the dangers which press upon us must be situated in
this context, given its fair measure of concern and no more.
A man is all or he is nothing either a unique mode of the know-
:

ledge of God or a mote of dust among milliards of others. Outside

of religion and of the truths communicated to us through Revela-
tion, he is of no importance, and the Nazi or Communist view or —
that of any other ideology which totally subordinates the individual
to the collectivity —
has logic on its side, as against the feeble
sentimentalities of those who imagine that human lives or human
feelings matter in the context of contemporary secularism. The least
deserving of mercy when the swords are unsheathed is the humanist
who supposes he can cherish humanity while excluding religion.
He, in a sense, is the judge who orders the execution and the ;

—
Lenins, Hitlers, Stalins or Maos of our world and other bewildered
peasants or petit bourgeois intoxicated with Utopian theory are —
merely the executioners.
While the clouds come down upon us and the storm rages, we
build our sandcastles because they are good in their small way and
some are beautiful, and because they reflect the patterns of another
place, a more enduring realm, projected into these fragile turrets
and outworks but every man or woman born contains the possi-
;

bility of being something infinitely more than a short-lived creature

of this short-lived earth, just as a seed contains in virtuality a great
tree. What we can be we must be, or fail utterly. That, in its stark
simplicity, is our situation.
 MAN AS VICEROY

Once upon a time (but not so very long ago) a European beggar
wandered into an Arab cafe in Blida. One of the Muslims there
handed him a coin. 'Do you think God will take note of such alms-
giving?' his companion asked him. 'You never know,' he told them,
'who may be concealed under the appearance of a poor man.'
Such prudence would be natural to a Muslim brought up to
believe that the Friends of God come and go as they will, disguised
—
now in rags, now in riches, with power to change utterly when it
is God's will —
the nature of a situation or the pattern of a life. You
never know. Each man's 'inner secret' is, they say, known only to
God, and each man is to be treated with respect not only because
the neighbour is worthy of respect but because he may be quite
other than he seems and lightning may lie dormant in his hands.
Sometimes these hands are peacefully clasped, their power
showing itself only to save or to heal. So the tale is told of a certain
disciple who pestered his spiritual Master to teach him the Great
Name, the secret Name of God that is said to be known only to
thosewho are closest to Him and to carry with it an overwhelming
force. Wearied by these constant demands, the Master told his
disciple to spend the morning at the city gate and report scrupulously
everything he saw. There was little to report. 'I saw the people go
in and out. An old man passed with his donkey laden with firewood.
A soldier came after him, beat him and seized both his donkey and
the wood.' The Master asked him what he would have done to the
soldier if he had known the Great Name. T should certainly have
demanded his death !' 'Well,' said the Master, T must tell you that
this old woodcutter who allowed himself to be maltreated without
complaint none other than he who long ago taught me the Name.'
is

But the lightning is not necessarily controlled by the Friend or

Beloved of God, upon whom it rests with the gentleness of Spring
sunshine. So the Muslims tell another tale to illustrate the fact that

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 MAN AS VICEROY

power as well as mercy inhere in the great ones who walk secretly
among us. It is said that the eleventh-century Persian saint, Abu
Sa'id, lived for a certain period in great luxury, feasting much and
entertaining himself with music and dancing. Those who might
have recognised his sanctity under the more conventional disguise
of poverty were not sharp enough to see through such a mask as
this and were duly scandalised. One of them, a certain Amir, pressed
harshly for the settlement of a debt. The saint said nothing, did
nothing, but the Amir's faithful hunting dogs went mad soon after,

turned upon their master and tore him to pieces. God, they say, is
not mocked and those who mock his friends may create within the
;

natural world such a whirlpool of disorder that they are themselves

destroyed.
This is where our human ideas of justice and fairness, serviceable
enough for certain purposes, are broken upon contact with a wider
scheme of things. The Christian world has known, through many
centuries, the legend of that 'innocent' bystander who, when Christ
!'
passed with his Cross, called out 'Get on with you Go faster
: !

and was therefore condemned to roam the earth until the Day of
Judgment, homeless and rejected by all men. How was he to know
that this scourged criminal was the Christ ? How can we expect the
average man to be so constantly on the alert that he is ready for the
moment when Reality breaks through the carapace of time like
lightning from heaven? But our incapacities are not, though we
like to think them so, the measure of all things and when the;

harmless little man who lives decently enough in the familiar

shadows of the normal world finds himself suddenly in the full
blaze of sunlight, he stumbles against the adamantine rock and is
broken.
The People of the Book, as the Muslims call those who follow the
Bible, were always aware of the presence in the midst of the crowd
of individuals who might look like everyone else but who carried
with them a breath of air from another place. Both Christian and
Jewish legends tell of these mysterious strangers, passing unnoticed
except by the few who were sufficiently alert to recognise them for
what they were, but the pre-Christian legends of Europe Ger- —
—
manic as well as Greek tell the same tale in their stories of the gods
disguised as poor wayfarers, strange visitors to the king's palace or
the peasant's hut, bearing with them a message or a warning, the
solution to a riddle or the secret of some hidden treasure. The same
 KING OF THE CASTLE
theme appears in Hindu and Buddhist mythology and, indeed, in
the myths of almost every ancient people. The Wanderer is every-
where.
But the worlds in which the Wanderer was observed or made his
presence known were worlds which, according to the modern view,
vastly overestimated man's importance in the scheme of things,
attributing to him a supernatural destiny beyond the brief span of
his life on earth and supposing him fit for salvation or damnation.
Ideas of Heaven and Hell (or, in Eastern terms, of transmigration
through superior or inferior cycles of existence) spelt out the impor-
tance of human acts and the nature of human responsibilities in
terms immediately comprehensible even to the simplest man. What
he did in his small corner had a significance beyond the furthest
frontiers of time and place, it shook the highest spheres, bringing
down on his head either manna from heaven or fire. The human
world, touched at so many points by the supernatural or the magical,
its windows wide open, its limits undefined, was —
in the proper
—
sense of the term awe-inspiring.
Awe and respect are closely linked. A purely "'social' morality,
one based upon the practical interests of the community and upon
the fact that misbehaviour on a wide scale represents a threat to the
community's existence, lacks the dimension of awe and must
eventually dispense with the idea of respect for the person (not just
as a good man or a useful one, but as a man). If the idea of respect
has so far survived, at least for purposes of lip-service (the Nazis
still found it necessary to justify or misrepresent their actions in

terms of an older morality, as do the Communists) this is because

the immense shadow of the religious point of view still haunts even
the most irreligious of our contemporary societies. It is only fairly
recently that God 'died'.
But if the idea of respect for the person does still survive it has
been reduced more and more to the social level and devalued. The
word itself has taken on slightly comic undertones and has lost
contact with the element of fear that once nourished it, fear of the
unknown, fear of the vast regions that may extend behind an
ordinary face. Losing respect for someone tends more and more to
imply that one thinks less well of his character it means that a
;

judgment has been revised or reversed in the light of some particular

action. And this is not the direction in which the roots of respect are
to be found.

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 MAN AS VICEROY
The limits of judgment become ill-defined if not forgotten in an
age which considers man only in his social context. These limits
are strict, for it is said that few sins are as grave as the 'sin of
Pharoah' whereby mortal man attempts to usurp the ultimate
Judgment Seat and whether he understands the meaning of his
so,
act or not, calls himself God. No man can say what another man is
worth, for this would require a knowledge of values so infinitely
distant from the social realm that it can find human expression only
in silence. Respect is rooted in the knowledge that this silence
absorbs and annihilates any words that we can speak.
If this were the beginning and the end of the matter, there would
be no need to consider where the limits of human judgment lie.
Silence may surround us and penetrate everywhere —
it is, after all,

a reflection of our own inadequacy —

but we have voices and must
—
use them. At every turn in our life in the world particularly where
—
our livelihood is concerned we have to judge our fellows in terms
of their usefulness for a particular task, their personal attitude to
ourselves and their probable future line of conduct. We have to
'place' them and we may not have
in the immediate, given context ;

the time or the patience to give much thought to what they are
outside this context. But we are also tempted, most of us, to inflate
this practical, ad hoc judgment to the dimensions of an absolute one.
We are tempted, in fact, to imagine that this momentary situation
in the context ofwhich we have made our judgment is of more than
passing significance. And, in this sense, the 'sin of Pharaoh' is the
commonest of sins.

We are still if we deny the right of

in danger of grave error
human judgment
love to eclipse without, —
of course, making judg-
ment invalid in its own, limited context. A love that is blind to the
facts of a particular character still takes a certain precedence by
virtue of the nobility of its origin. The silly girl who loves a criminal
and ignores the facts which stare her in the face, the foolish man
who loves a whore and supposes her chaste, still know more than
—
they think they know and far more than they are thought to know.
Lust itself, understood in the conventional sense, may open win-
dows which are closed to sober judgment and reveal, however
briefly (the 'sin' being in the brevity), a truth that was always there
and always will be. And Muslims tell the tale of a woman saint of
fabulous beauty who was followed one evening by a young stranger
hoping for a night of pleasure. She led him by devious ways to the

117
 KING OF THE CASTLE
meeting place of her companions on the sufi Path and told them
'Here is a true lover. Pour out for him the wine of True Love !'
Whatever tends towards the unification of what was formerly
—
separated and brings a glimmer of light the light of understanding,
of fellow feeling, of attention —into what was formerly a place of
darkness carries with it some faint stamp of nobility. When love is
based upon 'illusion', some apparently ludicrous mistake regarding
the character of the beloved, we still have to face the fact that the
lover spoke the right language even if he did so for the wrong
reasons. And sometimes it is enough that a man should speak the
right language —we need not be too concerned with his reasoning.
moral ideas are to exist at all as a basis for judgment, they can
If
only be based either upon a supernatural pattern (which must
necessarily conflict sometimes with the interests of the community)
or upon social considerations. Once social considerations come to
be regarded as the only practical ones, the legitimate judgments we
make of a man's usefulness here and now tend to usurp a quality
of absoluteness. Any group which provides shelter and nourishment
for men has certain rights of self-protection, and these are likely to
kill a man whose actions are totally incompatible
include the right to
with the group's well-being and safety. But this is still a matter of
judgment within a given context and related only to that context, a
judgment which may be correct here and now but might be quite
wrong under different circumstances and at another time, nor can
it pretend to be a judgment upon the man as such. It is when we
try to change someone, to reform (or 're-form') him and make him
fit for our own particular social matrix that we overstep the
mark.
Society may have the right to inflict many kinds of punishment
in its own defence, but there is one right it does not have and this is

to deprive a human being of his ultimate dignity, treating him as

inferior in essence and nature, and arrogating to itself the task of
making something 'better' out of him. We live in an age in which
the virtues of kindness tend to be rated above others and in
all

which the infliction of pain is — at least in certain Western countries

—regarded as peculiarly obscene, but it is a pity that we cannot
foster these virtues without losing sight of certain other considera-
tions. For there is also an element of obscenity and insult implicit in
the act of shuttingup a grown man in a hideous though hygienic
establishment in which he is treated as if he were a delinquent child.

118
 MAN AS VICEROY
The whip may be cruel compared with the model prison, but the
whipped man recovers. The prisoner who suffers daily humiliation
and deprivation of his manhood may never recover.
Society's right of self-defence against its enemies carries with it

some obligation to treat these enemies as equals. In a different

context (that of colonialism) the Jamaican author John Hearne has
written perceptively of the rival merits —or demerits—of the kindly
European as against other, less kindly colonising powers. 'Other
conquerors had demanded the usual payments of money, forced
labour and women but the Europeans demanded perpetual
;

acknowledgment of irremediable inferiority . . . They committed

the unforgivable humiliation of turning the world into an enormous
elementary school in which the white-skinned were the destined
teachers and the dark-skinned could never, at their most responsible,
be more than playground monitors. It is doubtful whether the most
extreme example of savage plunder has ever been more destructive
of human dignity than this weird combination of racial pride and
social conscience.'
This attitude towards subject races was characteristic of the
second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the
twentieth, and it derived to some extent (at least in its later develop-
ment) from the theory of evolution and from the technological
cleverness which appeared to prove the European's evolutionary
superiority. But if we drop the word 'racial', then it can be said that
a weird combination of pride and social conscience lies at the root
of the modern attitude to those who are considered either inferior
or unfortunate. In many cases —though not always explicitly —the
idea of 'inferiority' has been substituted for that of 'wickedness'.
Whereas wickedness often inspires a kind of awe, inferiority does
not, and it is obviously easier to treat the inferior man kindly than
the wicked one. In this sense, 'anti-social elements', as they are
now described in a number of countries, are better off under the
new dispensation. It perhaps ungrateful of such 'elements' to
is

feel that they would rather be treated as rogues than as foolish

children.
To say that certain types of criminal behave like children or have
the mentalities of children is a very loose figure of speech. One need
only place such a man beside a real child to be aware of this. And
only a society that has begun to see itself as absolute and as
encompassing the horizon —rather than as an island of safety in a

119
 KING OF THE CASTLE
—
menacing and mysterious sea could assume so readily that those
who do not fit into its scheme of things must be less than men.
At the same time, by the substitution of ideas of reform and
readjustment for the idea of punishment, society loses the chance of
satisfying one of its darkest but most pressing needs. There are
certain crimes (child-murder is one of them) which arouse in many
people a horror and an anger that must find an outlet or fester
inwardly. The normal outlet lies in the satisfaction of seeing the
criminal suffer in his own body something of the horror that he has
inflicted both upon his victims and upon his society, achieving
thereby a kind of catharsis. But this involves treating him as a man,
an equal, rather than as a sickly inferior. This need finds satis-
faction, not in humiliating but in hurting him, and however savage
it may seem (savage as grief) it does hark back to the ancient

awareness that a really monstrous crime disturbs the equilibrium

—and health —of the human community in such a way that order
and balance can be restored only by a monstrous punishment.
Two Slacks' may not make a 'white', but they do on occasion
balance and therefore annul each other in the harsh scales of natural
life.

From another point of view, however, it is just as well that we

have become kinder, for the imperfections of human 'justice' are no
longer compensated by the inefficiency of the available means of
catching and holding the criminal. It might be said that society has
a right to punish only as long as its enemy has a chance to escape.
In an age of escape-proof prisons and closed frontiers, the saving
grace of incompetence no longer balances the pseudo-absolute
operations of human judgment. On the day that the late Dr Crippen
was arrested by the use of transatlantic radio we were, perhaps,
deprived of the right to execute murderers. And now the passport
—
and a whole mass of restrictions on free journeying have taken
their place among the sinister paraphernalia of our age.
The claims of human society and of human 'justice', since they
could never be absolute, have always derived their legitimacy from
the fact that they were localised, their arm short though it might be
strong. Their physical range was limited and there were always
other places to which not only the criminal but also the victim, the
odd-man-out, could take himself in voluntary exile. A man might
disappear, and his society would not pursue him, could not pursue
him. But when relative rights and relative justice become inexorable

120
 MAN AS VICEROY

they lose thereby all legitimacy. From then on it is catch as catch

can.
One of the most striking signs of the increasing power of society
to engulf its members and to suffocate them is this closing of the
frontiers to all but approved travellers, a power that is reinforced
by increasingly efficient technological devices. The totalitarian
society's chief requirement, if aims at absolute dominance over
it

the human being, is that he should not be free even to dream of

escape. In the course of only a few years the last loopholes have
been blocked and we are now close to the 'ideal' situation in which
the only means of physical escape from a given social matrix will be
either suicidal violence or suicide itself.

And yet, leaving to one side the case of those whose centre of
awareness is open to quite another level of being for this is not a —
matter of escape but of profound involvement in the fountain and
—
origin of human affairs there remains the escape-hatch of insanity,
one that may be put to increasing use as the last physical frontiers
are sealed to all but those who have no need or inclination to escape.
And this could be one of the means whereby societies that have
usurped the quality of absoluteness will destroy themselves without
any need for a bolt from heaven to open them up. When men of
good sense have gone too far in rationalising the social structure
and in cementing its walls the time will have come for the madmen
to take over.
As with the criminal, so with the lunatic. Although insanity,
unlike criminality, does still and an inkling of
inspire a certain fear
strange seas washing against the shores of our island. This fear,
however, has become separated from the sense of awe and is deplored,
by the best authorities we should, so we are told, pity the insane
;

in exactly the same way that we pity the physically sick. It is only
the insane themselves who disagree with this view and they, of
course, are mad. But insanity is not always purely negative in
character. A man may have 'lost his wits' but, for good or ill,
something else may have taken their place. He is seldom no more than
a person from whom some part has been amputated in the sense in
which a one-legged man is simply a man who has lost a leg. And
when we treat him as such he feels obscurely but deeply insulted,
even if we are quite unaware of our own impertinence. It is not
surprising that so many of the doctors who work in mental asylums
seem to their friends a little 'unbalanced' in a certain sense they
;

121
 KING OF THE CASTLE
have been in daily contact with other worlds of experience which
have something of the same self-sufficient coherence that our world
seems to possess.
In the Islamic world insanity has tended to evoke a certain awe
and respect based, no doubt upon the Muslim's traditional pru-
dence 'You never know .' But when the Quranic
: . . revelations
descended upon the Prophet Muhammad they pressed upon his
physical body with an almost intolerable weight and Muslims have
been particularly aware of the tremendous strength required if one
is to stand and survive under the touch of the divine hand. They

expect to find among the insane some who, for all their excellence,
were not strong enough to bear this touch and whose worldly
personalities became disordered under its weight. In this context,
moving among such principalities and powers as may have con-
sumed or possessed the inmates of a madhouse or perhaps under —
the shadow of a more absolute and transcendent presence —the
psychiatrist who does not walk warily is a true babe in the woods.
And here we are not far from the roots of true charity understood,
not as a supernatural virtue, but as the rugged element in prudent
self-interest which, in Thibon's view, provides fertile soil for the
seminal action of grace. In terms of social morality, charity is
replaced by 'social justice' and by the ideal of an egalitarianism which
is expected to make it obsolete ;
but, in terms of realism, charity
begins with the awareness of our ignorance as to whom it is we face
when we face our neighbour or a stranger, a poor man, a thief . . .

When royalty slips in the mud every hand is held out to help ;and
this same fear of offending one who might hold our fate in his hands
dictated the prudent charity of other times —unless it was translated
to a more universal level and ignorance was replaced by the know-
ledge of an implicit omnipresent royalty.

wrote the American poetess, Emily Dickinson,

'Tell all the truth,'
'but tell it slant.' field of mathematics there are sound
Outside the
reasons for speaking, if not in riddles, at least by means of impli-
cation and allusion, parable and even hyperbole, rather than in bald
statements which, taken too literally, lead to the petrification of
meaning. Neither the facilities of human speech nor the contours of
the human mentality lend themselves readily to the expression of
truths which lie beyond the sphere of day-to-day affairs. But there
are points at which the direct statement, however liable it may be to
122
 MAN AS VICEROY

misunderstanding, becomes unavoidable. Any discussion of man's

real identity leads to such a point.
What is man in terms of the doctrines by which men have lived
through all ages ? He is, according to the Christians, made in the
very Image of God. For the Muslims, he is the Viceroy placed by a
transcendent Master in and over creation. For the Hindus his
inmost core one with the eternal and infinite Brahman, beside
is

which there exist only dreams and shadows 'That art thou !' And
:

for numberless 'primitive' peoples he is the central being who,

unlike anything else in the creation that surrounds him, has the
power to journey to and fro as message-bearer between heaven and
earth. We — —
humankind have until now thought him the one alone
of all that enjoy the light of day who can speak, by permission of his
Lord, with the voice of ultimate authority.
This is the idea that lies at the root of all prayer and all priesthood.
This is what men have lived by since the ages which preceded the
'dawn of history' even as history itself precedes today's newspaper.
Man is either Viceroy or else he is an animal that claims special
rights by virtue of its cunning and the devouring efficiency of teeth
sharpened by technological instruments, an animal whose time is up.
If he is such an animal, then he has no rights —
he is no more nor
less than meat —and elephants and lions, rabbits and mice must in
some dim recess of their being rejoice to see the usurper develop
the means of his own total destruction. But if he is Viceroy, then all
decay and all trouble in the created world that surrounds him is in
some measure to be laid to his count.
There is no getting around this choice, any more than the man
with the gun can be evaded by retreat into a dream world. If the
human creature is what he now thinks himself to be, then every
acre of ground he takes from the other beasts is stolen property, and
each time he kills an animal one of his kind should be slaughtered
to keep the scales even. But if he is truly what, until recently, he
thought he was, then he bears on his infirm back the burden of
creation, a stumbling staggering creature —
a nobleman who has
—
taken to drink and exhausted himself with whores unless he calls
upon a supernatural source of strength. Even then there is no
guarantee that his back will not break, for his earthly existence is
indeed brittle.
In purely human terms the idea of this poor creature as Viceroy
of God is no less absurd than the notion that he is created in the

123
 KING OF THE CASTLE
Divine Image. Yet the gulf which separates the ordinary man
this —
man of small stature from the latent nobility of the human
state may be bridged by the Arabic phrase, kcfannaka ('as if
you . . .'). Perfect virtue, excellence (ihsari), said the Prophet
Muhammad, you should worship God
is 'that as if you saw him
for if you see him not, yet he sees you.'
—
What matters is the intention to fulfil or to try to fulfil our —
proper function. The incapacity to do so unaided is universal but ;

our intention is expressed in the effort to act 'as if we were what in

truth and in essence we are. The rest is a matter of grace for how —
could a Viceroy fulfil his function without the mandate and the
support of the King ? He cannot appoint himself (the self-appointed
ruler is by definition a rebel and a tyrant). He does not derive his
authority from himself nor does the exercise of this authority
depend upon his own strength. He is appointed by another, his
authority derives from another and he is but the shadow of that
other. Yet what a shadow this is !

The complete fulfilment of the human function belongs, no

doubt, to Adam before the fall, to the Golden Age, and we in our
shabby place cannot afford to be perfectionists or to suppose that
what cannot be done well should not be done at all. The essential
distinction is between those who recognise this virtuality in man
and those who are blind to it. The possibility expressed in the words
'as if is indeed the glory which surrounds and plays upon the human

form. This is why the prudent man is convinced that 'you never
know .' For the very pavements await the coming of the Wan-
. .

derer. 'The saint has himself become prayer, the meeting place of
earth and Heaven; and thus he contains the universe, and the
universe prays with him.'*

If man stands above the web of 'eating and being eaten', above
natural process, this is not on account of his inventive genius, his
intellectual superiority to the monkeys or his capacity to generalise
about the nature of interstellar space, nor does it depend upon his
power to travel faster than a horse. His eminence derives from his
unique responsibility for coping with the burden of creation. As
long as he has one-tenth of a part of this awareness of his task, he is
still a man, and perhaps a hundredth part will do, but at some point,

* Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts: Frithjof Schuon (Faber &

Faber), p. 213.

124
 MAN AS VICEROY

eventually, the dilution becomes excessive until at last he is no more

than one of the lesser beasts among those which crop the grass or
devour their kindred.
The relationship of human beings to the animal world, as it is

documented in history and anthropology, is immensely complex,

but beyond the Christian sector attitudes have tended to crystallise
around two opposite poles, with many variations in between. On
the one hand there is the refusal to make use of animals except for
domestic purposes, hence vegetarianism and the religious ban on
the wearing of anything made from animal skins. Against this we
have the ritual of hunting tribes, aimed at 'reconciling' the animal
soul to its fate, and the Muslim and Jewish 'sacrifice' of the animal
that is to lend its flesh to the fostering of human strength (strength
to participate in a work of redemption which includes the animal
creation). Closely related to both these poles we find the belief
(present also in the annals of early Christianity) that carnivorous
beasts become gentle as lambs in the presence of a holy man. But
never at either pole or anywhere along the line that joins them do
we find the suggestion that man has absolute rights over the animals,
to do with them as he pleases. 'There is not an animal on the earth,
nor a flying creature soaring on two wings, but they are peoples
like unto you,' says the Quran.
A stern insistence upon courtesy to the living creatures that share
our world with us is common to the most diverse religious tradi-
tions. If a cobra comes into your garden, says a Muslim book of
spiritual instruction, you may order it to leave at once. If it returns
you should give it a second warning. And if it returns for the third
time you are free to kill it.
To treat such counsels as whimsical is to miss the point completely
and to fall into the common contemporary error of dismissing half
the truth that comes our way as belonging to the realm of fairy tales
—
and ignoring the rest as 'metaphysical' and therefore incompre-
hensible. The point of this particular story is that man by virtue of
his 'central', viceregal position enjoys certain special privileges but
does not enjoy the right to abuse these privileges. And the courtesy
which recommends is a courtesy based on awe and respect for all
it

that lives. Also, no doubt, upon a certain sense of equality (to

which countless traditional tales bear witness), not the same equality
as that between man and man, but a relative equality nonetheless
(those same traditional tales cite plenty of examples of the divinity

125
 KING OF THE CASTLE
manifesting itself through an animal). Formerly the world was

thought to be made up of men and beasts today it is a 'human* ;

world in which coal and oil and edible animals are counted among
exploitable riches which exist only for our use.
But this respect and this courtesy have nothing to do with a
sentimentality which focuses upon the 'doggy' qualities of certain
petted creatures, a sentimentality which is only the reverse side of a
picture which includes our animal factories and the inventive
medical experiments carried out on animals. The question that has
to be asked is not whether these farming techniques or these
experiments involve suffering (a matter upon which there may be
legitimate differences of opinion) but whether we have any inherent
right to do such things in other words, it is a basic principle that is
;

at stake. On this point the traditional doctrines are unanimous. This

is a misuse of the living creatures which share our world, an offence

against creation and therefore against God. If we are determined to

find ways of prolonging our earthly lives beyond their natural term,
we would do better to experiment upon ourselves rather than
involve non-human 'peoples' in our greed for longevity. Moreover
this reduction of the whole issue to a simple question of cruelty
carries with it certain sinister political implications, suggesting, as
it does, that no political system is evil unless it involves force and
cruelty.
There is, in any
profoundly threatening significance in the
case, a
precautions with which the men of earlier times surrounded them-
selves in their dealings with the animal creation the implication ;

that abuse of these creatures must lead to our own destruction and
that whatever we do to them will, by a simple process of cause-and-
effect, have to be done to us in one way or another. It was not for
nothing that the North American hunter underwent the most ela-
borate rituals of purification before taking upon himself the huge
responsibility of killing animals — and his 'sisters'
his 'brothers'
so that, clothed and fed, his people might carry on their work of
mediation between heaven and earth, a redemptive function which
encompassed all creatures that draw breath.
By a most curious irony, it is only since men came to see them-
selves as no more than clever animals, without any 'central' role or
any supernatural privileges, that they have started to treat the
animal creation as totally alien and totally without rights. What is
this, however, but a symptom of disintegration and of the descent

126
 MAN AS VICEROY

into infernal regions of greed and unawareness, and of a savagery

which shuts out the divine Mercy, exposing us to all the fury which
reflects, on the level of our earthly existence, the divine Wrath ?
Meanwhile, as always, the world is full of mirrors and the animal
creation shows us our own reflection. It is perhaps an ogrish
reflection, though this is not much noticed nowadays. For if the
people of our time are fearful of shadows and worry over trifles, it is
also true that they are strangely unafraid when fear might seem
more justified. They have no inkling of what the Muslims call
—
haybah 'fear of the Tremendous'. Only little things alarm them.
Terrified of material insecurity, quick to conform to the norms of
their society and watchful of their pension rights, they stand up
like titans to tempt Providence and to commit outrages that could
—
hardly be expected in any world which made any kind of sense
to go unpunished. But real titans know what they are doing, what
they risk whereas we whine indignantly about the nuclear bomb or
;

bacteriological warfare as though these things threatened us by

accident, the fault of a few naughty politicians.
One of the earliest of the Muslim sufi Masters told his disciples,
'When I commit a fault, I am made aware of it by my donkey's
temper,' and the Islamic tradition is full of stories to illustrate the
manner in which the animals hold up a mirror to man and reflect in
their behaviour the success or failure of his manhood, as also the
fear they have of all who are deeply involved in a 'worldliness' that
ultimately threatens them. So Dermenghem tells of a student of
Fes so poor that he lived in a cave and his single robe was in tatters.
A gazelle used to come every night and sleep beside him in his cave
and all the dogs in the neighbourhood rejoiced when he passed. But
one day his mother made a collection among his fellow students and,
unknown to him, sewed a bag of money into his robe. That evening,
when he climbed back to his cave, the dogs ran snapping and barking
at his heels and, when he reached it, the gazelle fled from him. Late
in the night, sleepless and troubled, he found the bag of money
and flung it far from him. Before dawn the gazelle returned and
next morning when he went down the hill, the dogs danced for
joy.*
And it is Companions once asked the Messenger of
said that the
God, 'Shall we be rewarded for good done to animals ?' 'There will

* Le Culte des Saints dans V Islam Maghrebin: Emile Dermenghem.

127
 KING OF THE CASTLE
be a reward,' he said, 'for whoever quenches the thirst of any
creatureendowed with a living heart/
But matters would still be comparatively simple if the inmost
core of responsibility reached outwards no further than the circle of
living beings and stopped there. It does not stop there. At the heart
of the most diverse religious traditions lies the doctrine that vice-
regal responsibility encompasses our environment as a whole and
that the distinction between animate and inanimate is not final, that

wood and stone and the very soil itself are within the circle of man's
power to redeem or to abuse. If Christianity has sometimes neglec-
ted this side of the matter, as Islam and Judaism have not, this is

because the attention of Christians has been so focused upon a

single act of universal Redemption that the call to 'imitate' Christ
has often been understood only in a limited moral sense.
In order to fulfil our function we must make some use of our
environment for food, for clothing, for the instrument of our trade
and, indeed, for the actual deployment of the possibilities which lie
within us, but the enjoyment of the good things available to us is
conditional
—'For the earth is the Lord's', say the Christians, and
it is not as owners that we make use of it. The fear of demons

(inhabiting inanimate matter or haunting the dark corners of the

world) which has been found so widely among 'primitive' peoples
and dismissed by anthropologists as animism or the personification
of natural forces, is a vestigial trace of the once universal knowledge
that all things have a claim upon us, a claim which, if it is ignored,
must bring certain consequences in its train. It is not demons but
consequences that haunt the dark forest, as they do the madman's
dreams and the praise of poverty found at some point in all
;

religions has a more than personal, moral significance, implying as

it does that man is to be parsimonious in the use he makes of his

natural environment and is not free to treat it as children treat a

bag of sweets.
Obligations, however, carry privileges with them and man has
the unique function of being able to take the inanimate into his
hands and make it beautiful. This, one might say, is the exercise of
his redemptive power — to bring into the light of day the meaning
that is only implicit in brute matter and to give form to what was
until then no more than a dark, inchoate longing for the miracle of
form. Here, most of all, the clumsy two-legged one can call himself
King of the Castle, bestowing nobility where he will and here is ;

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 MAN AS VICEROY

the contradiction to all fear and all parsimony, if only a man were big
enough to get a grip on the very globe itself and bring out its meaning.
All sacred art is rooted in the certainty that the artist, by virtue of
his 'central' role and by the skill with which he fulfils his role, acts
as a channel through which the patterns of heaven enlighten the
material of our earthly environment. And the forms and canons of a
particular artistic tradition exist to express meaning in exactly the
same way that the words of a particular language exist, not merely
as pleasing sounds, but as tools with which to say something. The
making of things that are themselves meaningful in terms of a
specific artistic language and the incorporation of these things into a
human realm that is saturated with meaning is in essence a Vice-
regal' function and in this case matter has been twice blessed, first
;

by becoming a vehicle of meaning and then by participation in the

ritual and religious life whereby the human community maintains
contact with the source of meaning itself.
Here then we have two concepts, two attitudes, between which
there can be no reconciliation on the one hand, a world which is
:

material for the creation of beauty on the other, a world which is

;

fodder for the human animal and grist for his mills. And here also
we are reminded of the distinction made earlier between that which
is drawn out of the river of change for enduring use and that which

is merely devoured and excreted in the process of man's 'meta-

bolism with nature'. In terms of that reverence for the natural

world which, like respect for the animal realm, was once normal
to man beauty is never a luxury — it is a pre-condition of use.
'We of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have the unenviable
distinction of having created the first ugly civilisation in the long
history of mankind. The industrial age has brought innumerable
benefits, but it has created an environment for man that is visually
little short of a nightmare.'* There are those who would say that
environment
this is itself the product of a nightmare —one in which
man as such has lost his dignity and his heritage, reduced to the
status of a dumb beast in a world without meaning and consumed
by his own ravenous appetites.
The riches of the modern world are unearned riches, for it is

only by fulfilling some small part of his viceregal function that man
earns the right to make use of his environment. We see a caricature
of this belief in the contemporary view that 'unearned incomes' are
* Sir John Rothenstein in The Times, 20th February 1965.

129
 KING OF THE CASTLE
wicked and that we have a right only to what we earn by our mental
or physical labour (labour which is, by definition, a labour of
exploitation) whereas the ancient view was that man has earned
;

what he is able to assimilate spiritually, what he can love as well as

use and what he can raise from obscurity into the daylight of beauty
and significance. Whatever else he takes to himself is stolen
property.
Social morality, censorious of theft from our own kind, cannot
take account of responsibility to and for creation. At any and every
time conflicts must arise between the two moralities (though they
are in fact situated at different levels and must therefore be in some
measure complementary to each other), but when the very idea of a
duty beyond that which we owe to our neighbour is lost sight of or
dismissed as irrelevant to human needs, then social morality inflates
to fillvacuum and, from being functional, becomes absolute. At
the
the same time it changes character, becoming more and more a
question of self-interest writ large. The beast that digs and forages
and consumes, blind to everything but its immediate needs, is then
no longer the individual man it is the social collectivity as a whole,
;

making use of its power to appeal to the 'better natures' of its

component individuals (in terms of morality, altruism and other
high-sounding principles) the better to subordinate them to its

ultimately self-destroying purpose. For the short-sightedness of

self-interest is proverbial, and social morality, no longer dwarfed by
the vision of horizons wider than those of the 'human animal', must
eventually degenerate into the attitude of a parasite greedily un-
aware that it is destroying its host.

Such which the common assumptions of

a situation as ours, in
this particular moment imposed upon everyone by a
in time are
vast educational machine and on the television screens which
dominate almost every home, can be 'put in its place' only if it is set
in juxtaposition to some totally different situation based upon quite
other assumptions regarding the nature and destiny of man. Con-
temporary science fiction has been used on a number of occasions
to drivehome the point that our world is not necessarily The World
and that our way of life is not the only way open to rational beings,
but it is not really necessary to reach out to the stars in order to make
comparisons. In the past two hundred years the European has
destroyed or corrupted a great number of ancient cultures which, if

130
 MAN AS VICEROY
we have the courage and the honesty to look into the mirror they
provide, show us all that we need to know of ourselves.
No history has ever been written of this cultural holocaust (for
the Communists are by no means alone in making history fit theory).
A man might usefully make a lifetime study of the impact of Western
civilisation upon some corner of Asia or Africa without exhausting
the lessons to be drawn from it. But, for our present purpose, the
most and the most illuminating examples lie in the very
striking
heartland of the —
modern world in the encounter between the
invading palefaced people and the 'Indians' of North America.
There were, at the time of the European invasion, some six
hundred Indian nations or social groups in America north of the
Rio Grande. Between them they brought to life and lived out in—
—
body and soul an astonishing variety of religious and social
patterns, so that it might be said that if no other human beings had
ever existed on the face of the earth the richness of human possi-
bilities would still have had its flowering.
And yet there was a certain unity in the midst of this astonishing
diversity, the factor of unity being the realisation or actualisation
—
under many different forms of man's viceregal identity. Indeed it
could be said that this factor of unity was itself the source out of
which all this rich diversity flowed. A prophetic genius which was
once, perhaps, the distinguishing quality of the human as against
the animal creature survived in that strangely virgin land of forest
and mountain, plain and desert, long after it had become for other —
—
races no more than a rumour voiced in myth and dubious history.
It was almost as though, for that small segment of humanity, the
world was not yet a fallen world (although, from another point of
view, the hardness of the Indian's life and his deep awareness of
pain suggest that it was only by an act of supreme heroism that he
preserved a flavour of the Golden Age in a darkened universe). In
his relationship with the natural world and with the beasts around
him and, above all, in his intimate awareness of the neighbourly
powers of heaven, he was a living exemplar of human qualities
scarcely dreamed of in our time. This is an exemplar that should
have a particular appeal for an age which often makes a cult of the
development of the human personality for the chief object of the
;

Indian's art was himself.

This art, says Schuon, is 'concentrated, direct and bold', a
framework for the human person. In the midst of an intensely

I
3I
 KING OF THE CASTLE
perceived environment of landscape, of sky and stars, of natural
elements and wild beasts, this man wore the garments of one who
knows himself to be king of the great castle of creation: 'his
majestic head-dresses (above all his great array of eagle feathers),
his dress streaming with fringes and embroidered with solar
symbols, the bright-patterned moccasins which seem designed to
take away from the feet all heaviness and all uniformity, the feminine
robes of an exquisite simplicity . .
.' #

Man him he is called upon to

dresses the part his culture tells
play, but in traditional societies he dresses (or paints himself) also
as a means of showing in visible form the true identity which is
hidden within the bodily shell. If he dresses as a 'god', this is
because he believes the 'god' inhabits his innermost being, and his
costume is like a mask which expresses what is most enduring in
him, covering the plasticity of flesh, which changes, ages from year
to year (an image of becoming and of our incorporation in the flux
of time), with a changeless image.
The North American Indian, says Schuon, had no intention of
'fixing' himself on this earth, where things crystallise or petrify in
time if they do not evaporate : 'this explains his aversion to houses,
especially stone ones,and also the absence of writing which, from
his perspective, would "fix" and "kill" the sacred flow of the
spirit . The red man's sanctuary is everywhere and this is also
. . ;

why the earth should remain intact, virgin and sacred, as when it
left the Divine Hands .'f For many of the nomadic tribes, the
. .

notion of putting plough or spade to the earth would have been

exactly comparable to what desecration of the High Altar is for the
Christian. In certain of his rites he humbled himself before the
whole of creation, because all visible things were created before him
and, being older than he, deserved respect but, at the same time, ;

man was pre-eminent because he alone was capable of knowing the

'Great Spirit' {Wakan Tanka, in Sioux terms). As Viceroy he knew
and listened to his Master, and as Viceroy he respected and spoke
to his province.
In order to discern the tragic nature of the white man's impact
upon such a culture as this it is not essential to believe that the
Indian's view of the world was correct, although this was the kind
of view that humanity has taken through most of its history, and
* Language of the Self: Frithjof Schuon (Ganesh & Co), p. 222.
f Ibid, pp. 220-21.

132
 MAN AS VICEROY

even the most brash newcomer must surely hesitate before dis-
missing it out of hand. The one essential is that we should put
aside for a moment the conviction that our way of living and think-
ing and acting is the only valid way and look with unprejudiced
eyes upon this particular 'clash of cultures'.
But ifone believes that the modern view stands in relation to the
traditional beliefs of our kind as an aberration (or simply as a state
of ignorance in the exact sense of the term), then what happened
was not merely tragic, it was diabolical. The destruction of bridges
which link heaven and earth, providing men with the means of
fulfilling their viceregal function, is always a diabolical thing and
may be expected to bring in its train the most hideous consequences
for the world as a whole.
'The conscious, calculated, methodical, official and by no means
anonymous destruction of the "red" race, its traditions and culture,
in North America and partly also in South America, far from having
—
been an unavoidable process and as such possibly excusable in the
name of natural laws, provided one does not oneself claim to have
—
outgrown these laws thanks to "civilisation" this destruction, it
must be said, certainly remains one of the greatest crimes and most
notable vandalisms of all human history.'* Since the presence in
their midst of people who find meaning in the world is intolerable
to those who think themselves the victims of a meaningless universe,
the basic structure of the Indian's spiritual life had to be destroyed.
'First, in the Sioux country, the Army crushed the Sun Dance with
armed force. Then the missionaries influenced the Bureau of Indian
Affairs toimpose regulations against not only the Sun Dance but all
"pagan" ceremonies which, they believed, impeded the progress of
the Indians towards Christian civilisation. The Interior Department
framed a criminal code forbidding Indian religious practices .'f . . .

But it was not as Christians, trying to impose one code of meaning

upon another, that the white man descended upon the Indian. It
was as a horde in which rapacity and the sterile superstitions of
'progress' had already destroyed the spiritual heritage which had
been its own birthright.
These invaders differed from all others who, in one part of the
world or another, had burst their frontiers in an access of super-
abundant energy, because they alone had achieved the capacity to
* Light on the Ancient Worlds: Frithjof Schuon (Perennial Books), p. 85.
t Indians of the Americas: John Collier (Mentor Books), p. 137.

J
33
 KING OF THE CASTLE
look upon everything in creation as material for exploitation, seeing
a tree only as timber, alamb only as meat and a mountain only as
the site for a quarry. This single-minded rapacity, now taken for
granted as natural to man, was so strange to the Indians of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the invaders might as well
have come from another planet. Even their descendants hesitate to
speak of the 'nameless thing' for which their languages offer no
—
appropriate term the combination of greed and fraud and perfidy
which they encountered in their dealings with the white man.
Nothing in their previous experience had forewarned them that
men could be like that.
But rapacity breeds its own skills, and the invaders, though to
Indian eyes they appeared ignorant, physically dirty, mostly
drunken and, in general, both godless and lawless, carried dreadful
weapons in their hands and enjoyed all the advantages which the
unprincipled enjoy in their dealings with those for whom honour is
paramount. The hordes spread out over a land of almost magical
richness, untapped, unravaged, in which the very trees had been
regarded as temple pillars and the earth itself too sacred to be
trodden except by winged moccasins, and congratulated themselves
upon pursuing so worthily their civilising mission.
For the victims of this mission there could only be, in the words
of a former US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 'sadness deeper
—
than imagination can hold sadness of men completely conscious,
watching the universe being destroyed by a numberless and scorning
foe . . John Collier, who had a unique opportunity to know these
people and who wrote of them, 'They had what the world has
lost .... The ancient, lost reverence and passion for the earth and
its web of life,' emphasises the quality of sadness rather than anger

in the Indian's assessment of his dealings with the white man.

Perhaps this sadness includes a certain pity for all of us, since
humanity is ultimately indivisible.
It was on land long held sacred (and kept intact from human
scarring) and from particles of matter once thought to be beads in
the garment of the 'Great Spirit' that the first nuclear weapons were
developed. And there, high over the land which had once been too
holy to suffer the touch of spade or plough, the first of the 'mush-
room clouds' spread its grim canopy.

* John Collier, op. cit., p. 104.

r
34
 MAN AS VICEROY
When the Westerner is asked in what period of history he would
have chosen to be born, had the choice been offered him, he chooses
— if he is sensible —
the present day. He is a twentieth-century man
with a twentieth-century face and twentieth-century emotions.
Transported, just as he is, to some other period of time he would,
no doubt, be thoroughly miserable. But when he assumes that the
people of other times must have led lives of complete wretchedness
because he, in their place, would be wretched, he is allowing
subjectivism to run away with his judgment. He needs all that the
modern world can offer in the way of richness and he could do with
more of it, but this need is an aspect of his twentieth-century
nature and he has no grounds for supposing that all men in all times
have had the same needs.
The invalid must have comforts and delicacies for which the
healthy man would have no use, and, if we are deprived of our real
function in the universe, then we are indeed sick with the most
debilitating and demoralising of diseases, that of uselessness. If the
—
human creature is as was generally supposed designed for the —
use of God, as a channel of communication between the given
world and all that lies beyond it, then he will find no satisfaction in
serving other masters. The service of his fellow creatures or of the
State or of some ideal —or else, as an alternative, a life given up to
sexual excess or the search for excitement — can never be more than
substitutes.
When time has worked its disillusionment, the exhausted 'do-
gooder', the worn component of the State machine and the
embittered idealist are not really so very different to the ageing rake
who has pursued enjoyment throughout his life and has come now

to theend of the road. The one thing necessary was missing. Within
the narrow bounds of the profane or secular realm some lives may
be marginally better than others, some marginally worse, but it
does not matter very much. When people scuffle together in a dark
room, from which every glimmer of light has been excluded, they
may do as they will.
'We have the possibility,' wrote Simone Weil, 'of being mediators
between God and the part of creation which is confided to us. Our
consent is necessary, so that through us he should perceive his own
creation.'* And she added, later in the same book, 'Every creature
who has come to perfect obedience constitutes a singular mode,
* La Pesanteur et la Grace: Simone Weil (Plon), p. 46.

135
 KING OF THE CASTLE
unique and irreplaceable, of the presence, knowledge and operation
of God in the world.'*
When we
are called upon to break down the obstructions raised
by our own anxious and demanding selfhood this is not because
unselfishness is a socially useful virtue, but solely that we may
provide a clear channel through which grace descends and vivifies
the things of this world and through which the achieved glories of
the world may be, as it were, carried back to their source. Our
immortality is as a window, not as a wall.
But men are not conceived to remain for ever embryos or for —
ever children, adults or old men. Nor is a child to be considered
simply as an undeveloped adult, or an aged man as an adult in decay.
In our ultimate identity we are all that we have ever been together
with all that we are yet to be, and if a man's life makes sense it does
so as a whole, not in terms of this or that cross-section apparent at a
given moment, but as might be seen from beyond time Now, said
it .

the Rabbi Baalshem on his death-bed, now I know why I was born !

The pattern of any given life can be seen only when it is com-
pleted. It is said that some few are so gifted that they can perceive
the outlines of the whole from a small fragment of action just as —
the decisive qualities of a man's character may sometimes show
themselves in a mannerism or in the way he reacts to a particular
crisis (for there is a sense in which the whole must be expressed in
—
every part) but this is outside the competence of ordinary human
judgment, which generalises too readily from the fragmentary.
People often don a mask, not to conceal the 'true' personality, but
to disguise characteristics which they know are not really significant
in terms of their true identity but by which they might be judged and
assessed. In the same way that a profound maturing of the
personality is often preceded by a period of great uneasiness and
even of physical illness, so a man's best qualities may first show
themselves in clumsy and inept forms, the personality as such taking
its first awkward steps at a new level. There are human states which

can be judged only in terms of what they will lead to in ten or

twenty years' time, and this is particularly true of the young.
The freedom we require of society is the freedom to actualise
what in truth we are. Tor Thou hast said, "Although I know thy
secret, nevertheless declare it now in thine outward act".'f Just as

* La Pesanteur et la Grace: Simone Weil (Plon), p. 55.

f Mathnawi of jfalalu 'din Rumi 1.60.

136
 MAN AS VICEROY

the artist is called upon not so much to impose meaning upon

material objects as to bring into the light of day a significance
already inherent in them, so man as such is called upon to show
within the limits of his earthly context —what his real name is for,
;

says Rumi, 'that which is our end is really our Name with God.'*
If man is a 'central' being, a Viceroy, as the traditional doctrines
of humanity maintain, then this is the starting point for his acts of
self-revelation. But there are as many ways of exercising the vice-
regal function as there are living men. 'Everyone,' says Martin
Buber (quoting a Chassidic saying), 'should know and remember
that his state is unique in the world and that no one ever lived who
was exactly the same as he, for had there ever been anyone exactly
the same as he there would have been no need for him to have
existed but in reality each person is a new thing in the world, and
;

he should make his individuality complete, for the coming of the

Messiah is delayed through it not being complete. 'f
And in this the Jews voice another belief that is implicit in the
most diverse traditional teachings, the belief that the created world
itself exists so that certain possibilities —
a store of latent meaning
which can find outward expression only in the peculiar conditions
of space and time may be demonstrated and exhausted, and that
creation cannot come to its end (and final redemption) until all that
can be said has been said and all that can be done has been done.
It is here that responsibility starts, acting upon the first of all the
—
things we are given to act upon our own most intimate individu-
ality — and so working its way from the centre outwards towards the
peripheral world. But when we consider a particular being's
success or failure in expressing what he exists to express (so far as
we can guess at it) we have to keep one essential fact in view this :

achievement does not necessarily obey the laws of growth and

maturity as we know them, and it may show itself in youth (or even
in childhood), so that the rest of this particular life-span seems like
a dusty anti-climax, or it may flower in old age, like a bloom on a
dying plant, when all the useful powers of mind and body are falling
into decay. Its timing is not by our calendars.
But any talk of 'individuality' carries with it, particularly in the
modern context, certain grave dangers of misunderstanding. Too
* Mathnawi ofjalalu 'din Rumi 1.1244.
t Jewish Mysticism and the Legends of Baalshem: Martin Buber (J.M.
Dent), p. 29.

137
 KING OF THE CASTLE
often it suggests a self-enclosed 'subject' set down in a predomi-
nantly hostile world of 'objects', and this 'subject' or person is

regarded as a bundle of thoughts and emotions, hereditary and

acquired characteristics, rolled into a ball that is then kicked and
buffeted by 'outside' circumstances. We cannot begin to understand
the traditional view of man unless we realise that these circum-
stances are themselves an aspect of the individuality insofar as they
are its destiny.
The ultimate subject, the innermost core of man's being, is not
perceived by the mind, the emotions or the senses. These are
objects of its awareness. There is no radical distinction to be made
between what a man is given in the way of mind, emotional make-up
and body on the one hand and, on the other, what he is given in the
way of outward circumstances and environment. Together they
form a significant whole and all are aspects of a particular individual
life.

The being between birth and death scrawls — in matter and in

events —a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique
identity. This man, So-and-So, is not a sealed personality moving
through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he
does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range,
spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single,
timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are
cannot ultimately be divided. And to accept our destiny is to accept
ourselves, recognising that what happens to us is as much a part of
— —
our nature in the widest sense as the most intimate contours of
our own selfhood. It is sometimes said that the fatal bullet has its
victim's name upon it and fits no other flesh.
In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within himself
and says, So me. Looks at his withered hand or wounded
this is
foot and says, So this is me. Looks at the woman he has married or
the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally
upon his enemy and upon his death and says, So this is me. But in
saying this he bears witness to the fact that he is also incomparably
more than an itemised list of the elements which compose his
individuality and its inseparable field of action.
And in acknowledging so much that is a part of ourselves (since
our boundaries extend to the furthest horizons we can see from our
particular vantage point) we make an act of recognition which
actualises what was inherent in us from the start almost as though —
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 MAN AS VICEROY

we existed —
only to discover what was always there recognising our
name-tag on everything that comes our way. But the part of us that
is our destiny, streaming in upon us in the form of 'outside' events

through the course of time, can be recognised as belonging to our

own particular pattern only when it has happened. The religious
man can say, 'Thy will be done!' as a statement of his intention to
accept this will when it has been done and is apparent to him, but
it is not our nature to be able to foresee the future except under the

most unusual circumstances. In general, acceptance of destiny is

acceptance of what has happened, not of what might happen (but
might be prevented).
— —
Islam, which is in the highest degree the religion of sub-
mission to destiny, is also the religion of Holy War. And there are,
for Islam, two aspects to this Jihad, the 'lesser' one being the war
against all that makes for disunity and separation in our environ-
ment, and the 'greater' being the war against all that makes for
disunity and separation within ourselves. The nature of this war is
—
illuminated by the fact that as soon as the battle or a particular
—
phase of the battle is over, the outcome, whether victory or defeat,
is to be accepted as God's will and as the only means whereby a

particular message could find expression in human events.

Islam requires that men should fight with all the strength they
have against what seems to them evil, hostile or destructive, but
that in doing so they should keep always in mind the Quranic
phrase which is heard so constantly in the conversation of Muslims
— 'But God knows best .
.' In other words, since it is in the nature
.

of things that we should have some powers of judgment and dis-

crimination, we must use these powers and act upon them, but our
action always takes place in the half-light, provisional and liable to
correction in terms of a total pattern of which we are unaware.
When we fail, it is because success at that particular moment and in
that particular context would have been a monstrous thing, con-
trary to sense and opposed to what we are and always have been
beyond our deployment in time.
The stars are in their places. Wind and weather, expressing the
nature of the terrestrial world, have carved their meaning upon the
mountains. And men 'who understand' (to use the phrase that
occurs again and again in the Quran) set themselves to read the
'signs' that are given them in the natural world and in the events
which come upon them, convinced that nothing can be ignored,

!39
 KING OF THE CASTLE
nothing is irrelevant —not the chance word, not the unexpected
encounter, not the fragmentary dream —and that the pattern which
is their 'Name with God' is being revealed from moment to moment,
as though by so many brush strokes.
But the fact that a man's efforts meet with failure can never be
taken (as some have supposed) to imply that the effort should never
have been made. That this effort should have been made was as
—
necessary to the pattern as was its defeat or its apparent defeat
(since 'unsuccessful' action can have a profound influence upon
events) nor does the fact that a particular cause may seem to have
;

been totally defeated mean that it was 'wrong' and that the cause
which triumphed was 'right'. Our powers of judgment do not
extend far enough to assess the ultimate outcome of the efforts we
make, and we cannot see the end of their repercussions in the course
—
of time. Indeed, time itself and our inability to look ahead into the
future in the way we look back at the past — is the precondition of
our particular kind of freedom as creatures existing here and now,
and it is time that makes possible the exercise of viceregal responsi-
bility.

The complaint that such conditional freedom permits no more

than the acting out of a play already written and concluded is, like
the argument between 'free will' and determinism, based upon a
confusion of perspectives and of Whatever the doctrinal
levels.
differences —the —
between the world's
differences of statement
religions, all acknowledge that the future is 'known to God', or
already inherent within the ultimate matrix of Reality and that, in a
certain sense, all that is to happen is already there. What matters
—
from our point of view is that it is not yet here and that we are not
God. For us it has not yet happened. That is why we exist, our
identity fragmented in space and time and, as the fragments are
;

gathered and the identity put together again, we are actualising

—
here and now something that in our given condition we cannot —
know in any other way.
And because that part of our environment with which we come
into contact in the course of our existence is itself an aspect of our

ultimate identity, can be said that the Viceroy's real field of action
it

is always himself and that the only battle he fights is in Muslim —

—
terms the 'Greater Holy War', which is the battle for self-
unification. But, because we are what we are, the practical distinc-
tion between 'subjective' and 'objective' remains a fact of experience

140
 MAN AS VICEROY

and provides the framework within which we operate. And it is

perfectly possible to operate in terms of this distinction without

imagining that it has any validity beyond our particular locality.
What matters, perhaps, is the awareness that the conditions
which govern this cockpit of ours are indeed local and relative and
that we ourselves have a dual nature, at once subject to these
conditions in our daily lives (through our mentality, our emotions
and our senses) and at the same time transcending them at another
level of our being. This awareness, although it took so many
different forms and was often implicit rather than expressed, was
once universal. Its loss has made invalids of us.
The people of other times knew suffering as we do and, so far as
the limits of recorded history go, may have known more of it. But
they did not have our acquaintance with meaningless suffering and
its partner, despair, which adds an entirely new dimension to pain

and misfortune. And if many of them accepted their destiny as

something imposed by the nature of things rather than as an aspect
of their own identity in the course of actualisation, their acceptance
had its roots nonetheless in a traditional wisdom which gave purpose
and meaning to acceptance. What are for us abstractions (or fairy
tales) were, for them, realities. They could do without the luxuries
and pastimes which we need to make our wretchedness momen-
tarily tolerable.
In the context of a world that made sense, a sense that was bound
to evaporate as soon as men no longer incorporated it in their daily
lives and in all that they touched or had to do with, the viceregal
function lay at the heart of all other human functions. If the world
has changed, this only reflects the change in the idea we now have
of our place in it. When the Viceroy lets go of the reins, all things
run wild.
 6
KNOWLEDGE AND ITS
COUNTERFEITS

Given the nature of the time process, it is not particularly surprising

that the notion of man's viceregal function and dignity should have
been forgotten. We are by nature forgetful, which is no doubt why
the religion of Islam describes itself specifically as 'a reminder to
mankind'. What is truly astonishing is that this notion should now
appear nonsensical to the vast majority of people in the West and,
indeed, to 'educated' people everywhere. The fact that a view of
man's destiny which could be considered, until so recently, as
something inherent in human thinking should be dismissed as a
fairy tale would be incredible if it had not actually happened.
No wonder that many of those who hold to the traditional view
believe the devil himself has bewitched our kind, putting to sleep
the faculties through which we were formerly aware of realities
beyond the field of sense-perception and making use of mirages to
lead us into a waterless desert. This process culminates in a narrow-
ing of horizons which Mircea Eliade and others have described in
terms of 'provincialism'. We live and think and operate today
within the dimensions of a wafer-thin cross-section of historical
time, effectively isolated from the past as from the future.
Evolutionary theory, as it is commonly understood by non-
specialists, has penetrated very deeply into the substratum of
human thought. It shapes opinion and distorts judgment in almost
every sphere, all the more effectively because it has become a kind
of unconscious and therefore unquestioned bias. People readily
assume that each generation is likely to be a little wiser (and possibly
even a little better) than the preceding one this assumption is ;

inherent in the idea of progress as it is commonly understood. If

that were then the beliefs and ideas of earlier generations might
so,
reasonably be dismissed as obsolete. Religion would be no more
than a vestige of primitive thought, and Christ might be considered,

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 KNOWLEDGE AND ITS COUNTERFEITS
at best, as a man ahead of his time, a signpost on the evolutionary
path. This appears to have been the view of Teilhard de Chardin,
that misled and misleading priest.
We make certain deductions from the facts available to our senses
in this thin slice of time. It is assumed that the people of earlier
ages tried to do the same, and since they did not deduce what we
have deduced from these facts they must necessarily have been our
inferiors. It is taken for granted that their beliefs were based, as
ours are, upon the observation of physical phenomena. They were
not very good observers and persistently drew the wrong conclusions
from such facts as they did observe they belonged, it is said, to a
;

'pre-logical' stage of human development.

This is, in the first place, a childish attitude. It is common enough
for children to enjoy a sense of superiority over adults who cannot
climb trees as they do or who make a mess of a jigsaw puzzle which
presents no problem to an eight-year-old, and a child may reasonably
wonder why a grown-up who can afford to buy ice-cream or choco-
lates every day of his life does not do so, just as we are puzzled that
the ancients never developed effective techniques for the exploita-
tion of the earth's riches. Grown-ups, however, have a different
order of priorities.
This childish aspect of modernism is nothing if not naive in its
view of the past. It takes for granted that if all we want is ice-cream
or its equivalents, then this is all that people ever wanted. They did
not know how to produce it quickly, hygienically and in quantity.
We do. They were not clever enough to invent motor cars and
aeroplanes. We are (without ever asking ourselves whether our
journeys are really necessary). They thought the earth was the
centre of the universe. We know better.
Arguments of this kind, however ludicrous they may seem, are at
the root of a great deal of modern thinking, not, of course, among a
sophisticated minority of scholars and intellectuals, but among
ordinary people who have received the usual smattering of educa-
tionand have been encouraged to believe that they know something
worth knowing. What matters, from this point of view, is not the
pure form of a particular theory but the form in which it has been
popularised, processed through the educational machine and assi-
milated by the masses. Religious (or metaphysical) ideas, when they
penetrate whole populations within a traditional environment, may
adopt simplified and what might be described as 'picturesque'

H3
 KING OF THE CASTLE
forms without thereby sacrificing either integrity or effectiveness,
but secular and scientific notions soon become slipshod and in-
accurate when they are popularised.
Most important of all, perhaps, modern thought is 'provincial'
in so far as most people are confined within the narrow limits of
faculties designed to deal only with our own small corner of creation
and ill-adapted (as is our language itself) to anything beyond self-
preservation and the getting of food. Our ideas of truth and indeed
of all that is seldom go beyond the things which fit the contours of a
mind as limited in its way as are our physical senses and we are
;

necessarily ignorant in the precise sense of the term, since it is

obvious that the mind as such cannot comprehend —within its own
—
terms of reference what lies beyond this particular locality and the
view visible from here.
The distinction between ignorance and agnosticism—a distinc-
tion which is often ignored in our time —
is of great importance.

The former is both natural and realistic it knows itself and recog-
;

nises its own impotence. To be human is, in the first place, to be

ignorant and to accept the fact that there is a great deal we cannot
know and, for that matter, a great deal we do not need to know. Idle
—
curiosity is certainly a vice a lust of the mind —whereas acknow-
ledgement of the fact that we have no intrinsic right to receive
answers to all our questions is an aspect of humility as it is of
realism. It is said that St Augustine was asked 'What was God
:

doing before he created the world ?' 'Preparing hell for those who
ask unnecessary questions !

Agnosticism however raises a personal incapacity to the dignity

of a universal law. It amounts to the dogmatic assertion that what
T do not know cannot be known, and it limits the very concept of
what is knowable to the little area of observation open to the
unsanctified and unilluminated human mentality. The agnostic
attitude derives from a refusal to admit that anyone can be or ever
could have been our superior in this, the most important realm of
all : the true knowledge of what there is to be known. Religion is
now seen exclusively in terms of faith rather than of supernatural
knowledge. In egalitarian terms, faith is acceptable you may believe
;

in fairies if you wish to. But the claim to a direct and certain
knowledge of realities beyond the mind's normal compass excludes
those who do not possess it and savours of presumption. The idea
that a saint among the saints may have known God —
not merely

144
 KNOWLEDGE AND ITS COUNTERFEITS
believed in —
him suggests 'unfairness' and implies the superiority
of some men to others. It puts us in our place.
Squatting in this place, this little pool, and hungry for certainties,
people hold on with a kind of desperation to the current notion of
what is (or is not) 'rational' ; and yet, 'the rationalism of a frog at
the bottom of a well consists denying the existence of mountains
in ;

this is logic of a kind, perhaps, but it has nothing to do with

reality.'* This rationalism is inextricably linked with the scientific
point of view, which is advanced as the only logical interpretation
of the world. Unfortunately nothing in this realm is as clear as it
should be. The 'facts' with which science supplies us are of quite a
different order to those registered by our physical senses. What the
scientist says, in effect, is this : you may take my propositions as
proved, provided you accept all the assumptions which appear
self-evident at this time, so long as you agree that the objective
world exactly fits the patterns inherent in human thinking (or vice
versa), on the understanding that the simplest explanation of a
given phenomenon must be the right one and assuming that the
physical world is sealed off from interference from any other realm.
This adds up to a formidable list of qualifications.
Contrary to popular belief, science does not offer us certainties in
the way that our senses provide a kind of certainty on their own
level. Scientific hypotheses are not facts, and before the scientist
can even begin to construct his theories he must make a number of
very sweeping assumptions which most people may agree to take
for granted, since they are in accordance with the present climate of
opinion, but which can never be proved.
He must assume the absolute, objective validity of his own mental
processes and believe that the logic of these processes is a universal
law to which everything that is or ever could be conforms. Common
sense tells him that this is so, but common sense is a variable factor
which changes from one age to another. He can never be certain
that the images which his senses present to his mind are a true
representation of realities which exist independently and objectively.
Not unlike the man who interprets the outside world in terms of
what is taking place in his own entrails,
seeing a bright day when he
feels welland finding the world a dark place when his system is
choked with waste products, he may in fact be applying to observed

# Logic and Transcendence : Frithjof Schuon, p. 42.

H5
 KING OF THE CASTLE
data the laws which govern his own mentality, an instrument con-
structed for the practical business of living much as the entrails are
constructed for the digestion of food. Since inner and outer, sub-
jectiveand objective, are, in the last analysis, two sides of the same
coin, he is likely to find that the protean physical world provides the
answers he expects of it (these answers being implicit in the phrasing
of his questions) and experiment will confirm the theories he has
constructed without, in fact, taking him beyond the subjective
realm.
However complex the instruments designed to extend the range
is always to some extent dealing
of our senses, scientific exploration
with patterns inherent in the exploring mind and meeting the mirror
images it has projected. Nature mocks and eludes us, seeming to fit

herself into our mental categories because our minds are themselves
embedded in her structure. We
imagine ourselves standing or —
floating —above the natural world, competent to survey it objec-
tively, and the intervention of scientific instruments between our
naked senses and the objects of observation heightens this illusion
but a mentality which is part of the natural world can never escape
and look down as a disembodied agent upon its own matrix. That
element in man which does indeed transcend the natural world is in
him but not of him, and the objectivity of its awareness is very
different from the fictional objectivity exercised by one facet of
nature in relation to another.
But while the scientist, in his increasingly private and abstract
sphere, finds a marvellous concordance between his thinking process
and the movement of a needle on a dial or the traces of radiation on
a photographic plate, the ordinary man of our time faces a widening
gulf between scientific theory and any kind of objective experience
known to him.
No longer can men be told that the truth of things will be con-
firmed in their own intimate experience if only they will look and
listen. Theproofs and arguments of contemporary science are so
abstract and so technical that they are no longer open to criticism
by the non-specialist and cannot be tested against any kind of
experience known to man as a living creature. Informed that the
electron's position does not change with time, but does not remain
the same, and that, although the electron is not at rest, it is not in
motion, Francois Mauriac remarked 'What this professor says is
:

far more incredible than what we poor Christians believe !'. The

146
 KNOWLEDGE AND ITS COUNTERFEITS
theories employed by modern physics have not merely by-passed
mind they have gone beyond the range
the contours of the rational ;

of human imagination.
'In those never-never, through-the-looking-glass abodes,' says
Professor Huston Smith, 'parallel lines meet, curves get you from
star to star more quickly than do Euclid's straight lines, a particle
will pass through alternative apertures simultaneously without
dividing, time shrinks and expands, electrons .jump orbit without
. .

traversing the intervening distance, and particles fired in opposite

directions, each at a speed approximating that of light, separate
from each other no faster than the speed of light.'* After this no
one has any excuse for finding obscurities or improbabilities in the
higher reaches of theology and metaphysics. If the majority of
people still imagine that the physical sciences relate in some way to
their normal experience this can only be because they are living in
the past, comfortably immured in the mechanistic science of the
nineteenth century.
Although in no sense supernatural, contemporary scientific
theories do not relate to the spectacle of nature as we know it in our
daily lives, and their 'proofs' derive from experiments carried out
under almost unimaginable conditions (at temperatures a fraction
of a degree above absolute zero and so on) with the aid of immensely
—
complex equipment. In factual terms and a fact, after all, is
something against which we expect to be able to stub our toes
this is a very remote and esoteric region. And it is partly because
these theories, together with their proofs, are unverifiable in terms
of human experience and because they originate in the extra-terres-
trial conditions created in the secrecy of the laboratory that they
have such power to bind and fascinate. Their glassy surface offers
no purchase to the mind's sceptical probing.
A field of knowledge in which the ordinary person can participate
only by believing what he is told by experts corresponds very well
to the political field of the totalitarian State in which he participates
only by doing what he is told to do by an anonymous them, while
the notion that every new fact discovered by science adds to the
universal store of human knowledge and that this quantitative
accumulation is an unqualified good finds its echo in the belief that
every technological advance contributes to the wellbeing of man-
kind.
* Forgotten Truth: Huston Smith (Harper & Row), pp. 105-6.

H7
 KING OF THE CASTLE
Speaking of the 'normal and providential limitation of the data of
experience', Schuon remarks that, while no knowledge is bad in
itself and in principle, many forms of knowledge may be harmful in

practice 'because they do not correspond to man's hereditary habits

and are imposed on him without his being spiritually prepared
the soul finds it hard to accommodate facts that nature has not
offered to its experience, unless it is enlightened with metaphysical
knowledge or with an impregnable sanctity.' The unenlightened
and unsanctified personality, subjected to a barrage of facts and
theorieswhich contradict its own intimate experience of the world,
ismore likely to be maimed than nourished. Through their educa-
tion and by means of books, newspapers and television, people's
minds are now crammed with ill-assorted fragments of knowledge.
Without any unifying principle, this adds up to little more than a
pile of debris which is never effectively sorted or assessed. No
wonder we choke on it and lose our bearings.
People have a longing for normality or, in other words, a need to
be what they are meant to be. It would be strange were this not so,
but the fact remains that, when the true norm has been forgotten,
it is only too easy to go off into the wilds in pursuit of a substitute.

Just as nostalgia for the integral traditional society, in which every-

thing fits and everyone has his place under the light of heaven, can

draw us fatally towards the totalitarian society, so nostalgia for true

and certain knowledge induces us to embrace its counterfeits and to
mistake an accumulation of facts for something that they can never
be. Quantity, by whatever factors it may be multiplied, is never
more than a finitenumber, a fragment. Though you pile fact upon
fact until theheap of evidence seems to touch the sky, it is still
nothing in comparison with totality, just as a distance of countless
light-years still comes no closer to infinity than does a single centi-
meter.
A counterfeit coin is still a coin, though we mistake its nature and
its Those who are deceived may blame it, but the coin is
value.
what itno more, no less. Scientific knowledge is what it is,
is,

neither absolutely true nor absolutely false, but always relative and
contingent. Theories based upon the observation of happenings
which occur again and again in a particular cross-section of time
have their practical uses but can never be more than hypothetical
in so far as we take them for certainties, they are counterfeits.
To say this is not to suggest that observed facts and the general

148
 KNOWLEDGE AND ITS COUNTERFEITS
laws derived from them are without significance, but only to
emphasise the fact that they belong to the realm of relativity
—
and therefore of uncertainty and cannot under any circumstances
emerge from this domain. They deal with phenomena in a particular
theatre at a particular moment in time, but they can tell us nothing
about the open, the universal, the total. They remain bound to a
locality, since any given phenomenon may be 'explained' in a
variety of ways and at various levels our preconceptions
; and the —
prevailing climate of opinion —
determine our choice of explanation.
At the same time, science can never allow for the ambiguity
inherent in the natural world, an ambiguity which is brought out
with particular clarity in the Hindu doctrine of maya, the divine
art, the divine magic, the divinely willed 'illusion' which is, in a
sense, all things to men. The physical sciences deal exclusively
all

with the slippery and deceptive realm of maya and therefore cannot
in any way determine the nature of the Absolute or, indeed, pretend
to take precedence over direct, immediate knowledge on the one
hand or its objective counterpart, Revelation, on the other. But
— —
what can and does happen is that these relativities and proba-
bilities are inflated until they fill the view and nothing else can be

seen.
Facts and the theories derived from them lodge only in the mind,
whereas the metaphysical truths which lay at the root of human
belief in other times transcend the personality as such and are no
more exclusively mental than emotional or sensory. They may be
—
expressed in mental formulations an idea or a statement but —
they can never be enclosed within this formulation or in any way
limited by our faculties. In the ancient traditional societies they
were reflected, not merely in the theories whereby the mind
organises its material, but also in myths and rituals, as they were in
—
every aspect of common life man's waking and his sleeping, his
eating, his love-making, his fighting and his work. This was the
basis of that unity of life which most of us would give all that we
have to repossess. Fragmentation of the personality is the salient
characteristic of 'modern' as against 'primitive' man, and the
problems which now arise regarding man's role in society, patterns
of sexual behaviour, or the distinction between creative work and
servile labour are aspects of this fragmentation.
Since responsibility is necessarily a function of the whole man,
those whose actions are regulated by only one part of their nature

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
and who are at war with themselves find it easy to deny paternity
when faced with the consequences of what they have done. The
scientist whose pursuit of knowledge leads (indirectly, as it seems
to him) to appalling consequences is aware that he never willed this
outcome, very much as the man who rapes a young girl can say
quite truly that he never meant to harm her. Scientists may suggest
that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is natural to man,
just as the rapist may feel that emotion, if it is powerful enough,
contains its own and both can take refuge in the
justification ;

excessive emphasis upon motives and conditioning which tends to

isolate modern man from the great web of consequences which he
actualises. The fact remains that consequences do follow acts, and
they must belong to someone.
There exists a popular image, fostered by the media, of the dedi-
cated scientist, working long hours in his laboratory yet happy as —
a child at play —
careless about money and naive in the ways of the
world. Real scientists may not always be quite like this, but it is

understandable if they adopt the required pose on occasion ; like so

many masks, it expresses a truth. When this 'innocent' is faced with
the consequences of his obsessive pursuit of knowledge, unregulated
by any principle beyond a kind of mental lust, the truth becomes
shockingly apparent. With indecent haste, he seeks for scapegoats
(wicked politicians or rapacious businessmen) who have bent his
precious discoveries to their own evil purposes. He had, of course,
takenit for granted that none but angels would make use of the

knowledge he has wrung from his intercourse with the natural

world.
It is not as though he had never been warned ; and this is the
most astonishing aspect of the scientist's claim to innocence. The
very fact that he is able to carry on his pursuit of factual knowledge
is the outcome, at least according to one of the basic lessons children
learn at school, of a long battle against 'persecution', against
'obscurantism' and against 'superstition' or, in other words, against
the massed weight of human opinion in earlier centuries. There is

however another way of looking at the obstructions formerly placed

in the way of scientific advance. A fence at the cliff's edge is an
obstruction, certainly, but it has not been placed where it is without
reason and to suppose that the men who raised these obstructions
;

were quite without intelligence or foresight is an impertinence

which only reflects our own stupidity.

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 KNOWLEDGE AND ITS COUNTERFEITS
The battle against the physical sciences was waged with particular
ferocity inChristendom at the end of the Middle Ages. The gestures
of those who tried most desperately to halt the process make one
think of dumb men attempting to prevent someone from striding
cheerfully to perdition. The Inquisition, for example, did not have
the right words, they could not have been expected to know the
unknown or to see in detail where this new learning would lead, but
a sound intuition alerted pious men to a fearful danger. In a fury
of despair they would dig up a dead man's bones to condemn him,
too late.

The investigation of the natural world 'in depth' and the pursuit
of factual knowledge for its own sake were then regarded as danger-
ous and ultimately destructive absurd to be surprised
activities. It is
if these activities do turn out to be both dangerous and ultimately
destructive.
In the Islamic sector of the world the sciences showed less
inclination to go off at a tangentfrom the total truth and were not
subjected to the same 'persecution'. The presiding idea which
dominates every aspect of Islamic thought the divine Unity, —
beside which nothing can be said to have more than a shadowy and
—
contingent existence was of such power that fragmentary ideas
were unlikely to escape from its magnetic field.
Even so, the note of warning was sounded often enough and Ibn
'Arabi, perhaps the greatest of the medieval Muslim philosophers,
compared scientific delving into the secrets of nature to incest, a
prying under the Mother's skirts and this is one way of character-
;

ising the desire of one facet of the natural world to know another in
itsmost intimate contours. The penetration of nature by the fact-
finding and analytic mind keeps time now with the rape of the earth
we tread and with the exploitation of our fellow creatures. An
incestuous conjunction of mind with matter engenders some mon-
strous offspring.
Our bodies (and there is a sense in which the whole world, the
whole of nature, is our body) are clothing which lasts a little while
and then falls apart. We have better things to do than pick obses-
sively at this clothing, placing its fragments under the microscope,
making it our sole and absolute concern. Human dignity forbids
such dreary obscenities.
It is not easy to stand out against the spirit of the age, nor is there
any reason why it should be. It is right that people's minds should

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
tosome extent be closed to ideas which do not fit the framework of
preconceptions which enables them to think and to act coherently
a man whose mind was wide open to every notion that came his
way would be paralysed by uncertainty and deafened by a cacophony
of conflicting sounds. The fact remains that those who attempt to
break down this protective wall of preconception start at an immense
disadvantage when required to argue their case.
In the open societies of the West, free discussion and argument
have great influence, particularly now that they are brought into
almost every home by television. Where there exists a solid sub-
—
stratum of agreement that is to say, whenever the debate is
—
within the limits of the present climate of opinion argument serves
a practical purpose. If two men wish to travel to the same destina-
tion it is useful for them to argue over which is the best route to
take but if their goals are quite different they are bound to be at
;

cross-purposes. Where there is a radical disagreement over funda-

mentals, argument, in the commonly accepted sense of the term,
brings confusion rather than clarity. What do the opponent of
science and the scientist — or, to come to essentials, believer and
unbeliever —have to say to each other ?

Not that dialogue is impossible. One can envisage a debate, held

in quietness and intimate privacy (with no possibility of playing to
the gallery), in which a believer and an unbeliever explore one
another's minds over a long period and, inspired by a common
desire to understand, achieve communication. Confined to thirty
minutes in a television studio, such debate can only be farcical.
Time and patience are of the essence, not to mention divine grace,
love and a kind of stillness deeply infused with the longing for
truth. Those who stand poles apart should never attempt hasty
dialogue, unless they confine themselves to discussing the state of
the weather. 'Haste is from the devil,' say the Muslims, 'and slow-
ness is from God' and the clocks must be stopped if these two men
;

are to understand each other.

But time is too valuable (when awareness of the timeless has been
lost) for clocks to be stopped, love is at best a bit-player in this
drama, and stillness is incompatible with controversy. All that such
hasty debates between believer and unbeliever offer us is a battle of
wits and a contest in verbal skills and, since the former is out of
;

tune with the spirit of his age, the rules of the game and the weapons
are never of his choosing.

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But perhaps there no battle to be fought or won, for in most
is

cases these antagonists have only the illusion of meeting and there
is simply the spectacle —
familiar in farce —
of two men shadow-
boxing on opposite sides of the stage, unaware that their blows
never make contact. They are in different places. It is not enough to

share a common language if there are no common assumptions to

provide the basis for argument. Without any such basis each partici-
pant feels that the other is 'missing the point', as indeed he is since
the 'point' is the truth as seen from the place at which he has taken
his stand and these men are too far apart to share the same view.
Heirs of a fairly unified culture, we still take a certain uniformity of
viewpoint for granted, but in the modern age it is quite possible for
people living side-by-side in the same society to inhabit entirely
different worlds.
Because such a situation is by nature painful, those who take

their standupon the religious interpretation of the universe, being

a minority and respecting democratic procedures, go to extra-
ordinary lengths to meet their scientifically-minded companions
rather more than half-way, as though a man tall enough to look over
—
the fence were to squat down for the sake of keeping company
—
with his children and peer through the hole they have bored in
the wood, pretending this is all that can be seen of the next-door
garden.
If 'provincialism' is taken to indicate narrowness of viewpoint,
then Eliade's phrase is particularly apt in relation to the contraction
which has taken place over a long period and which was already
well advanced among 'educated' people when Descartes first made
awareness of his own thinking self the starting-point of all human
knowledge, taking care to shut the doors and windows before
sinking into the cavern of mental self-awareness.
In appearance, the outer world has expanded as the inner has
contracted. A small vaulted universe, lit by friendly lamps and
haunted by familiar spirits, has opened out into the unimaginable
vastness of space with its thin population of burning stars on the ;

other hand, inner space, a spiritual universe extending from nadir

to Empyrean, has contracted to the dimensions of the skull-box.
This process (reminiscent of the scientific theory of an 'expanding
universe') might be visualised in terms of a child's bubble-blowing
— an 'objective' world which swells in proportion to the life-breath
pumped into it. But size, unless it has human significance, is

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
nothing in relation to infinity. A distance of a thousand light-years
is further than a man could walk and having said this there is little
;

more to be said about such distances. They are irrelevant to the

business of being a man.
It is in this sense that man is 'the measure of all things'. As
Viceroy, his concern with the area given him as his particular and
is

unique destiny his only concern beyond this area is with an eternity
;

subject neither to contraction nor expansion.

The vastness its many dimensions, permits
of 'inner space', with
contraries to co-exist but the attempt to fit truths which belong to
;

different levels and make sense in terms of different perspectives

into one framework at one particular level (that of the laws which
govern our mental processes in the context of everyday life) is an
impossible task. It is also an unnecessary task, for we ourselves do
not live on one level only. But this is what rationalism, with its
two-dimensional scheme of things, tries to do, and this is why the
scientific view cannot be questioned on its own ground or in terms
of the proofs and arguments which it considers valid.
It might seem too easy —and yet it would be true enough—to
say that rationalism is false simply because it is an '-ism'. It is false
because of its pretensions to universality, its claim to include the
whole of reality within its orbit, and because it excludes everything
that cannot be fitted into its own particular and local categories
false, in other words, because it is a counterfeit, pretending to be

something that it is not. Reason is one mode of knowledge among

others, and rationalism is its Tharaonic sin' (whereby the partial
and fragmentary usurps the place of wholeness).
Man is a rational being, but he is also something much more.
—
Reason is one of his tools not his definition. Its nature is to
operate in terms of irreconcilable alternatives : this is black or
white this creature
; is male or female either this animal will
either ;

eat me or I shall eat it, and so on. These alternatives are indeed real
on the level of our sensory experience, and since this experience is a
form of true knowledge the instruments by means of which it is
perceived and organised cannot be entirely false so long as they —
keep their place. But the man who imagines that he can interpret all
that is in terms of rational categories might be compared to some-
one who supposes he can absorb and digest knowledge through his
belly.
Those who are unable to understand that they add up to more

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 KNOWLEDGE AND ITS COUNTERFEITS
than the sium of their own instruments and who cannot accept the
fact that the area of possible knowledge extends into moulds quite
unrelated to the contours of the human mentality are prisoners in
their own empirical and conditioned selfhood. Their speculation is

a ball bounced against the walls of their cell.

The fact that there are aspects of truth which can never be
formulated in logical terms is frustrating to the mind's lust for
totality ; the inconceivable is dismissed as being unknowable and
therefore 'unreal'. Illusions are always conceivable, since they are
rooted in our faculties and cannot exist without us ; but truth does
not need us and is independent of our faculties as it is of our powers
of conceptualisation. God, in his essence, is said to be quite incon-
ceivable in terms of the mind's language ; but there is nothing
inconceivable about a flying hippopotamus, however improbable
such a creature may be. The mind comprehends facts and is at ease
with fictions. It is not by its nature apt to grasp realities unless
enlightened by an enabling power which comes from beyond its
sphere.
To dismiss partial modes of knowledge simply because they are
what they are is just as grave a fallacy as to mistake the partial for
something total and all-embracing. If reality could not in some
measure be represented in mental, emotional and physical terms it
would not be reality and if the mind had no contact with reality we
;

would all be mad. What has been lost in a mind-fixated age is

awareness that the mental representation is by nature limited and
incomplete, as is the emotional state or the physical image. Truth is
expressed in these different languages without being exhausted by
anything we can think, feel or say about it.

There is a necessary tension in the religious and intellectual

spheres between acceptance and rejection of the partial images
through which mind, emotion and senses maintain their hold on
reality. Most of us cannot do without our mental concepts, our

anthropomorphic image of God and our physical symbols and the ;

hidden truth responds to our need because it has its origin in the
fountain of the divine Mercy and also because it is by nature partially
conceivable, a fit object for love, and present in the sights, sounds,
odours, flavours and tactile qualities of the physical world. To
reject such partial knowledge as is offered by our natural faculties
is a kind of self-mutilation but to suppose that truth in its totality
;

can be encompassed by these faculties is idolatry.

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
The inveterate human tendency to idolatry (worship of the
reflection to the exclusion of that which is reflected) is, in the
Muslim view, the most dangerous and the most universal of sins.
The Islamic Revelation broke in upon a culture which had petrified
into gross forms of idolatry this was a moment in time when the
;

breaking of images and the release of the spirit of truth from a

stony prison was most necessary. But quite outside the historical
circumstances which, providentially, determine the accent and
emphasis of a particular religion, this Revelation had the function
of redressing the balance between those who would bind the truth
in mental formulae, emotional fixations and physical images, and
those who insist upon its transcendence above all that we are
capable of thinking or feeling or doing.
Without supernatural wisdom and without the humility which
recognises the subordination of the reasoning process to that
wisdom, it is impossible for human minds to keep a just balance
between transcendence and immanence, reconciling the notion of
God as totally 'other' (in Quranic terms, 'having no likeness what-
soever') with the idea of God as intimately present everywhere
('closer to man than his jugular vein') ; but it is still a useful
exercise to set such contrary ideas side-by-side within the mind's
narrow cabin (as do the Zen Buddhists by means of their para-
doxical koans), until we begin to sense, far beyond our human reach,
the existence of a point at which the contraries meet.
When two concepts, each capsulated in accordance with our
—
mental needs, appear at once irreconcilable as, for example, do
—
the notions of predestination and free will and yet necessary if
our existence is to make any kind of sense, then we can only reach
out towards that incomprehensible point. It is beyond the range of
our bread-and-butter faculties, but this does not in any sense
indicate that it is absent from the world or unrelated to the human
—
person in his totality. On the contrary, the belief normal to man-
—
kind that there is a meaning inherent in everything that exists
and everything that happens must necessarily imply the omni-
presence of that point, that truth, that centre.
Such beliefs as this are commonly classified as 'mystical'. They
can then be treated, not with the hostility and resentment which
so often accompanies the dismissal of 'organised religion', but with
a gesture of respect to a gentle and poetic eccentricity, too remote
from everyday life to represent a threat to our way of life. And

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 KNOWLEDGE AND ITS COUNTERFEITS
yet there have been some good swordsmen among the mystics who,
like David, have slain their ten-thousands.
In so far as the term has any precise meaning, mystics have no
doubt followed their inward path in all places and all periods,
triumphing over the obstacles presented by social chaos or social
regimentation, sharing the vocation of the heroes and martyrs who
stride over the turbulence or the petrifaction of their world with
all the splendour of elephants rampaging through the bush. But

the place they are going is the place we must all reach, and most
people are not mystics, heroes or potential martyrs. They are not
even elephants.
This is where the attempt to isolate mystical experience from
the habitual stream of life in the sense in which, for example, musical
experience may be isolated as something irrelevant to the lives of
those who cannot share it, breaks down. The mystic is different
from the rest only as the flyer is different from the walker, though
both must hope to come What he
to the city gate before nightfall.
is talking about is but whereas he may find his
also their business ;

way unaided by the society in which he happens to live, the com-

mon man, the quite unelephantine man, needs all the help he
can get and has a right to expect this help from his society and ;

human societies, if they are to have any claim upon our loyalty
beyond that of practical convenience, exist to beat a path through
the bush for those who cannot fly or even trample.
What the traditional, God-centred societies offered their mem-
bers was a life saturated with the awareness of realities beyond
the reach of mind, feeling or sense in terms of their normal func-
tioning and a whole system of bridges leading to mountain or
hillock, as the case may be, but certainly leading outwards and
upwards from the flatlands. The objects of sense were vivified by
symbolism, emotion was universalised in ritual, and mental con-
cepts were not self-sufficient propositions (limiting reality) but
keys to supernatural knowledge.
In earlier times, says Thibon, 'men did not know the contours
of the human and cosmic lock, but they possessed the key . . .

Modern thought as a whole no longer occupies itself at all with the

nature or existence of this key. The only question posed before a
closed door is to examine it most painstakingly, not to open it. ,#
Or else we ignore the door altogether (mistaking it for a section of
* Echelle de Jacob: Gustave Thibon, p. 177.

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
an impenetrable wall) and set the key under a microscope, treating
the instrument which lies in our hands as though it were an end
in itself.

This could be a definition of idolatry : to worship a key instead

of setting it to the lock. And here we come to the great divide
which separates rationalism and all its offshoots from the traditional
view of ideas, feelings and the phenomena of the material world as
symbols and therefore as signs which, if properly used, point
towards the timeless perfection which, in their flickering fashion,
they signify. 'We shall show them Our signs on the horizon and
within themselves, until it is clear to them that this is the Truth.'*
For the Islamic Revelation embodied in the Quran, all that we
see and all that we find is of a superabundant richness, not on its
own account, but because in its very existence it reflects the divine
Qualities and reminds us of their source. A star, a bird on the wing,
a forest or a river, and many lesser things ('Allah disdains not to
coin the similitude even of a gnat . . .') are facets of a universal
Revelation.
But to live with things that are other than they seem, among
signs that point away from themselves, amidst bridges that lead
elsewhere and ladders of which only the lower rungs are visible
is hard for those who hunger after narrow certainties. It is easier

to settle down where we are and regard the sign as a work of art,
the bridge as a piece of masonry and the ladder as a wooden frame,
accepting appearances for what little they are worth and trying to
forget that death will —
so far as we are concerned reduce all such —
works to nothingness.
Trimordial man sees the "more" in the "less"/ says Frithjof
Schuon. 'The infrahuman world in fact reflects the heavens and
transmits in an existential language a divine message that is at
once multiple and unique. 'f Christianity, he points out, could not
fail to react against the real 'paganism' of the cultural environment

within which it crystallised as a world religion, but in so doing

it also destroyed values which did not in the least deserve the

reproach of 'paganism' modern technology, he adds, 'is but an end

;

product, no doubt very indirect, of a perspective which, after having

banished the gods and genies from nature and, having rendered it

* Quran, 41 153.
j Images de V Esprit (Flammarion), pp. 15-16.

158
 KNOWLEDGE AND ITS COUNTERFEITS
"profane", by this very fact finally made possible its "profanation"
in the most brutal sense of this word.'
Paganism in the proper sense of the term is an idolatry applied
to the natural world, but it is also, in most cases, the debris of a
religion in the final stages of decay, when its adherents, like dogs,
sniff at the pointed finger rather than going where the finger points ;

idolatry, animism, fetishism and other such aberrations (assuming

that they exist objectively, and not merely in the modern observer's
mind) all bear witness to the fact that phenomena which were once
adored as symbols of transcendent realities have come to be wor-
shipped for their own There are many intermediate stages
sakes.
in this degenerative process, and it follows that one cannot always
mark the dividing line between images which are adored for what
they symbolise and those which are worshipped as 'gods'. In any
religious context —
and most of all in that of Hinduism there —
will be some men who understand that the image points away
from itself and others who mistake it for an independent reality
(in which case it becomes a counterfeit). At a time when the sacred
is all but banished from our world, we do well to be tolerant of

'superstition', so long as the intention behind it a willingness to —

adore the holy — is sound.
A new divine Revelation, breaking in upon the rusty structure
of the particular 'milieu' into which it is directed, is likely to sweep
the ancient images aside. It has no need of them. It offers a real and
effective alternative, a highroad in place of the little paths and
bridges which people had been using (or misusing) for ages past.
But when the highroad itself has begun to suffer the erosion of
time and has narrowed, then the loss is felt. Once it is out of sight
so far as the majority of people are concerned —no true path is to be
despised, no bridge scorned as 'naive' or 'childish'.
It is, in any case, one thing for the lightning stroke to destroy
such supports and quite another for busy, opinionated little men
to set themselves up as wreckers.
Islam and Christianity were both, at their inception, revolu-
tionary religions and therefore destructive, at least in a relative
sense. It happens to have been that sector of the world which was
formerly Christian that has imposed its patterns of thought and
behaviour almost universally, and ex-Christians are therefore the
wreckers with whom we are chiefly concerned. The vast majority
of Westerners who are not Christian believers in the full sense can

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
fairly be described as ex-Christians (or pseudo-Christians). Such
a heritage cannot easily be shaken off, and the fiercest opponents of
religion are often those who cannot forgive God for not being a
Christian (as they understand the term). The destructiveness
which was once no more than a side-effect of a great act of renewal
turns sour and vicious in men for whom the blazing certainty of
God's love and of Christ's redemptive sacrifice no longer have any
meaning. The rose in decay stinks.
It could be said that the world is nothing but a tissue of bridges
leading from here, where we find ourselves, to the 'other shore',
and in theory it is open
anyone to recognise sticks and stones
to
for what they really are and so to discover a Paradise which was
never finally lost. For him, no doubt, this world so opaque, so —
—
darkened in this winter season is still transparent as it is said to
have been when it issued from the hand of God, and prison bars
are no more than candy-sticks that snap in a child's grip. Perhaps
there will always be such strangers, born out of their time, since
time is not absolute and must sometimes be mocked. But what
of the rest ? The things we handle seem dark and heavy, the bars
are thick, and age wears us out. We have great need of crutches and
cannot be too proud to accept them wherever they are to be found.
With them, we may hope to hobble over such rickety bridges as
remain undestroyed.
What does a cripple feel, with fire or flood behind him and a
jostling crowd making for the only exit, if someone wantonly
knocks his crutch away and then destroys the bridge which led to
safety ? Rage, surely and if men knew what they have lost through
;

the arrogant destructiveness of the crutch-snatchers and bridge-

wreckers their rage would make the anger of warring armies and
revolutionary mobs seem kittenish.
The principal function of modern thought has been the wanton
destruction of 'superstition', a term which though it may —
properly be applied to little habits which have survived in isolation
from the doctrines which gave them meaning has expanded to —
include every kind of belief in the supernatural. Bridges, ladders
and, ultimately, the highroads provided by the great religions
have one thing in common they are invisible to those in
at least :

whom this been undermined.

belief has
It is difficult to measure wickedness and to define its degrees,
but those who set themselves to persuade their fellow men that the

1 60
 KNOWLEDGE AND ITS COUNTERFEITS
world is nothing but a meaningless agglomeration of material
particles (or the blind interaction of minute quanta of energy)
totally separatefrom man's inner being and that there is no joy
anywhere, no spiritual effort to be made, no eternal goal to be
reached, have done a thing beside which no massacre of the inno-
cents can stand comparison. Like the former Commandant of
Auschwitz, these destroyers of bridges have been, for the most
part, well-behaved, keeping their fingers off their neighbour's
goods and their neighbour's wife and this, as much as anything,
;

makes current notions of morality seem infantile. If those who do

the most harm go unpunished, how can we condemn mere thieves
and murderers?
But if wickedness may often be defined in terms of a half-witted
pursuit of relative good, then it can be said that much of this
wrecking has been undertaken in the name of a fine ideal, the ideal
of perfection. The idealist, the perfectionist, cannot tolerate what
is grimy or flawed or broken. Lacking any sense of the sacred,

lacking any courtesy towards creation and quite without modesty

a true 'savage' —
he rages to destroy the imperfect wherever he
finds it (and that is everywhere). Our world is, by definition, a
grimy, flawed and broken place, subject to decay and riddled with
death. If it were otherwise it would not be the world or to put —
—
the matter another way this universe of time and space would be
indistinguishable from the timeless and central perfection of
Paradise and would therefore lose its separate existence. The world
may be rendered transparent, so that perfection is discerned be-

hind its shapes and patterns, and it may be loved so that its very
deformities become the objects of a redeeming compassion but it ;

cannot be fundamentally changed at its own level. We have the

power only to substitute one evil for another, 'swopping black dog
for monkey' (as the Jamaicans say) or leaping merrily out of the
frying pan into the fire.
At the root of modern idealism, with its refusal to accept im-
perfection as something inherent in the human condition, there
lies a bitter and perhaps satanic puritanism which, carried to its

logical conclusion, would set fire to this world of ours and destroy
it utterly.
'You can work miracles', said one of his companions to the
Muslim saint, al-Hallaj 'Can you bring me an apple from Heaven ?'
;

The saint raised his hand and, within the instant, held in it an
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 KING OF THE CASTLE
apple which he offered to his friend. Biting into the fruit, the man
observed with horror that there was a worm in it. 'That,' said
al-Hallaj, 'is because, in passing from the eternal realm into the
world of time, it has taken on something of the latter's corrupti-
bility.'

This story has a bearing on contemporary attitudes to such

remain relatively intact in the modern world.
traditional bridges as
Ignored or dismissed by the scientific view of reality they are at
7
,

the same time condemned for the rust which has settled on their
outworks. They suffer the combined assault of rationalist and
moralist. Even the man who has sufficient humility to acknowledge
his own imperfections looks for a kind of primordial perfection in
religious institutionsand primordial purity in religious people.
As he might be expected to know better.
a fallen being himself,
Whatever 'passes from the eternal realm into the world of time'
must take on some of the limitations inherent in this world and
become subject to the laws which govern the context of its incarna-
tion. The organisation and institutions in which a divine Revela-
tion is fleshed cannot be immune to the process of decay, even

though the grace which shines at the centre of its manifestation

remains untainted. Since we are what we are and the world is
what it is, this reservoir of grace is tapped only by those who are
prepared to embrace the outer shell until, like the Prince who
awakens the Sleeping Beauty, they find what was always there,
awaiting them in the innermost room of the castle. From this point
of view the imperfections of any organised religion as it appears to
the outsider and the scandal created by some of its representatives
might be compared to the trials which the mythological Hero must
surmount before he reaches the goal of all desire.
There are many people in our time who, with an arrogance
which masks the inadequacies of a superficial education, think it
intolerable that plaster saints and household icons and desert tombs
should serve as bridges to true knowledge and that a God who is
said to be almighty should permit his grace and power to operate
through such seemingly humble instruments. They forget that
this same God is omnipresent and that men are therefore apt to
find him where they can.
—
The divine Presence within things in sticks and stones, in bits
—
and pieces implies their wholeness, but those who are themselves
inwardly divided and fragmented cannot recognise this. In the

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 KNOWLEDGE AND ITS COUNTERFEITS
idealist's alienation, his refusal to stoop to the small, imperfect
things, there profound betrayal of man's viceregality for the
is a ;

Viceroy is a bridge-builder, and these men know only how to

destroy. Obsessed by their ideas of neatness, they take their
scissors and snip away at existence like a child who, when he tries
to make his cut-out figure perfectly symmetrical, cuts first on one
side, then on the other, until there is nothing left. They seek
mastery through a process of reduction, and all that does not fit
is to be eliminated but in the long run nothing fits their cate-
;

gories. Everything must go.

'The explanation of the world by a series of reductions has an
aim in view to rid the world of extra-mundane values. It is a
:

systematic banalisation of the world undertaken for the purpose of

conquering and mastering it. But the conquest of the world is not
in any case was not until half a century ago —
the purpose of all
human societies. It is an idiosyncrasy of Western man.'*
In the traditional view of human destiny, degeneration is an

inevitable feature of time and history; but this process can take
quite different forms, on the one hand active and aggressive,
tending to violence and, on the other, passive, indolent and rela-
tively peaceful. One cannot doubt that the first of these is the
white man's sickness and we know how contagious it has proved
to be but the possibilities inherent in human nature do not differ
;

fundamentally between one race and another, and it might be

more accurate to say that the white man brought out in Asians and
Africans qualities which were already present, only waiting to be
—
awakened witness the speed with which Western vices and ideolo-
gies have spread through the rest of the world and also the eager-
ness with which so many traditional peoples have exchanged their
own craftsmanship for Western junk. This final destructive fever
had to break out somewhere. Once it had come to the surface, no
sector of our world was immune.
The grim ambition to subdue creation to our own narrow pur-
—
poses symptomatic of the search for a counterfeit Paradise
is now almost universal. Its inevitable frustration must surely lead
to increasing violence, ultimately self-destructive. And yet all this

isno more than the frenetic activity of ants around their little
mound, busy and blind under an indifferent sun. When they are

* The Two and the One: Mircea Eliade (Harwell Press), pp. 156-7.

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
done and peace is over all, the sun will still be shining and the
scattered fragments of existence will be re-assembled into the
wholeness which is their only meaning : 'And say —Truth has
come and illusion has vanished away ; illusion is indeed by nature
ephemeral. ,#
* Quran, 17:81.
 7
THE ONLY HERITAGE
WE HAVE
The arrogance of the West in relation to other cultures is decently-
cloaked in our time, for this an age of polite falsities but it has
is ;

not been outgrown. The fact that non-Europeans are expected

to adopt Western patterns of government and 'post-Christian'
morality (as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations) is
evidence of this. Condemnation of any departure from our own
particular norms of behaviour —
rooted as they are in European
—
history by Africans, Arabs or Asians is nowadays expressed
more in terms of sorrow than of anger, but it is expressed nonethe-
less and bears witness to a complacency which has survived two
World Wars and ignores the fact that our history is a quite un-
paralleled story of destruction and exploitation.
This complacency still blocks the way to any appreciation of
—
what has been and, to some extent, still is the human norm —
elsewhere and yet, without such understanding, it is impossible
;

for the modern world to see itself either in context or with any
degree of objectivity.
The distinguished historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, has sug-
gested that for the past half-century Western scholars have ap-
proached the study of mythology from a completely different view-
point to that of their nineteenth century predecessors. Unlike the
Victorians, for whom the word 'myth' was equivalent to 'fiction',
modern scholars —so he says—accept the myth in the terms in
which it has been understood in the archaic societies, that is to say
as a true story telling us something about the nature of the universe
and man's place in it.
This may be true of certain rare scholars, but it is very far from
being true of the general public or, for that matter, of the television
pundits who play a dominant role in moulding public opinion.
In this field, as in many others, the intellectual assumptions of

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
ordinary people are still based upon the scientific thinking of fifty
years ago ; and if reputable scholars have now abandoned the
notion that the great archaic myths are no more than an inept,
pre-scientific attempt to account for the observed phenomena of
nature, their views do not seem to have reached the writers of
school text-books or penetrated the minds of the majority of
educated people in the Western world.
A superficial study of the myths and rituals of 'primitive'
peoples played a significant part in undermining the faith of
Christians during the second half of the nineteenth century. First
it was taken for granted that these other races were 'lower on the

evolutionary scale' than Europeans (What, after all, had they

invented? Where were their railway trains?) Secondly it was
assumed by people who had completely lost the capacity for
analogical and symbolical thinking that the myths by which
these races lived were meant to be taken quite literally and
represented no more than the first gropings of the rational animal
towards a scientific explanation of the universe. On this basis,
since was impossible to miss the parallels between 'primitive
it

religion' and the most 'advanced' of religions, Christianity, the

question had to be asked whether the latter should not be classified
as just one more pre-scientific effort to account for observed
facts.
If these arguments were sound, then either one of two conclu-
sions might be drawn from them. It could be assumed that religion
is a phenomenon which evolves in step with human 'evolution',

so long as it is constantly purged of its 'superstitious' and 'un-

scientific' elements and kept up-to-date or else that religion as
;

such, including Christianity, is no more than a vestige of the pre-

scientific age, to be discarded together with all the other super-
stitions we have inherited from the times of ignorance.
Protestant sects, constantly on the defensive, have been only
too ready to adopt the first of these conclusions in the mistaken
notion that it offers their religion some hope of survival, and we
have recently seen the hierarchy of the Catholic Church stumbling
into this very pitfall. They imagine that Christianity might be
allowed to survive on a modest scale if it can be shown to be useful
is, to make men better citizens, more decent neigh-
to society, that
bours,more conscientious tax-payers and they are ready to
;

abandon everything that smacks of 'other- worldliness', of meta-

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 THE ONLY HERITAGE WE HAVE
physics or of ritualism. The more ground they give, the harder
they are pressed by their enemies.
And yet there is only one question that either needs or deserves
to be asked,and the answer to this question cannot depend upon
any contingent factor or upon moral and social considerations.
Religion is either true or false, reality or illusion. If it is true, then
nothing more needs to be said and the question as to whether it

makes men better citizens is irrelevant. If it were false, then it

would be no less so if proved capable of transforming this world

into a far more comfortable place. Our personal or social con-
venience has nothing to do with the issue, and far above all purely
—
human considerations beyond the need for consolation or the
fear of damnation — this question is posed in stark simplicity. The
answer we give to it determines the answers to all other conceivable
questions ; if affirmative, it is a total affirmation ; if negative, an
all-embracing negation.

There are occasions when poison and antidote are to be found

in the same place. Faced with the confusion of perspectives which
has been the inevitable result of the breakdown of those human
and geographical barriers which formerly divided different cultures
and different religious domains into so many separate worlds,
there is no going back to the simplicity of a single, self-sufficient
viewpoint. We are compelled to go forward to the recognition that
perspectives never really clash, their orientation being always
towards the same, unique centre. The knowledge of other doc-
trines, other ways to the centre, which has done so much to shake
the faith of those who had believed their own truth to be the only
one (as, in a sense, it was, since they needed no other to attain
salvation) must now be used to revitalise all those relative truths
which serve as bridges between our present existence and a realm
beyond such relativities. One bridge is enough for any man. But
first he must be convinced of its soundness. Under present circum-

stances this seems to depend upon having some general knowledge

of the nature of bridges.
This knowledge can scarcely be effective unless it takes account
of what is in fact the specifically human heritage (and the sub-
stance out of which all bridges have been built), the 'primordial
tradition' or 'perennial philosophy'. This is the bedrock of all
human awareness of what we are and where we are, and it might

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
be said that all the doctrines which have kept us human through
the ages and enabled us to make use of our heritage have been no
more than divinely willed adaptations of this basic wisdom to the
increasingly desperate needs of a —and
fallen still falling
humanity.
The great acts of renewal, the Revelations from which are
descended the world religions as we now know them, came about,
not as milestones on the evolutionary way, but as medicines for a
worsening sickness. They happened when (and wherever) the
archaic wisdom was in so grave a condition of decay that a direct
intervention from outside the normal context of human existence
was required if men were not to lose all sense of their real nature
and destiny. In the case of Hinduism, the acts of renewal never
broke the continuity of the tradition, but gave it a new impetus.
Christianity was able to maintain a close link with the Judaic tradi-
tion (hence the inclusion of the Old Testament in the Christian
Bible). And Islam, although it came into being in what was virtu-
ally a spiritual vacuum, has always been perfectly explicit as to its
role: the Prophet Muhammad was not an innovator, but a re-
minder of forgotten truths and the restorer of an ancient wisdom,
pointing a way of return to the normal and universal religion of
mankind and crowning, by his mission, the work of countless
prophets and messengers who had maintained the link between
God and man since the beginning of time.
Such interventions and renewals would have been unnecessary
if it had been possible then (or now) for men to tap the full re-

sources of the primordial traditions by remounting the stream of

—
time and as the People of the Book might say bursting back —
into the Garden of Eden. But the direction of time is only too
clearly indicated in everything around us, in the running down of
clocks, in the ageing and decay of things and organisms and in the
dissolution of patterns into their component fragments. This
direction may be temporarily reversed (since creation is not a
closed system) through the inbreak of That which is outside time,
through Revelation or through the rituals of renewal practised by
many 'archaic' peoples, but the possibility of returning once and
for all to the place from which mankind set out does not exist
within our frame of reference.
The lightning stroke of Revelation seizes upon wandering frag-
ments and organises them into a pattern through which some

1 68
 THE ONLY HERITAGE WE HAVE
quantum of meaning finds expression or some message is flashed
upon the screen of existence. The pattern, however, must even-
tually be subjected to the normal processes of time and suffer the
common fate of all things under the sun.
This is why we are denied access to the fullness of our heritage
and surmise its existence from the bits and pieces, the echoes and
the memories which are seen to lie all around us if only we are
prepared to recognise them for what they are. These fragments,
still to be found in the myths and rituals of the few 'primitive'

peoples who have not yet been totally submerged in the stream of
modernism, are immensely precious. They may have been warped
by the passage of time, and those who still live by them may in
many cases have forgotten their true meaning, but the fact remains
that they exist, they are accessible to us and, like a charred but
still just legible document, they provide confirmation of our
viceregal identity.
The religions with which the Westerner is most closely ac-
quainted —those of Semitic origin and, perhaps, Buddhism —are
'historical' in character, first in the quite simple sense that they
do have a history strictly comparable to that of human institutions
and temporal events, and secondly because the story of their
achievements and of the vicissitudes they have suffered takes a
significant place in their teaching. Time as we experience it in our
daily lives is the background against which they are observed and
understood.
The archaic doctrines, on the other hand, have no history. Their
relationship to ordinary time has been that of rocks towards the
sea which gradually erodes them. In this lies their strength, inso-
far as they recall conditions before the dawn of recorded history,
and their weakness, in that they cannot serve as models in relation
to which men of our time might organise their lives. They might
upon the fiction that nothing has
in a certain sense be said to rest
changed, nothing has happened, since time began. They have
survived precisely because events in time have been treated as
meaningless unless they could be related back to the pre-temporal
patterns of creation, reintegrated into these patterns and thus
transcended so far as their historical actuality is concerned. In-
wardly, at least, they have made time stand still.
A particular characteristic quality of all traditional societies,
says Mircea Eliade, is their opposition to the 'ordinary' concept of

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
time and their determination constantly to return, through ritual
action, to the mythical moment of their origin, the 'Great Time'.
Neither the objects of the exterior world nor human acts as such
have any separate being or significance —they are real only as
imitations of the universal, primordial gestures made by God or the
gods at the moment of creation. Nothing is worth noticing or
mentioning unless it has been bathed in the waters of its source.
It follows that, for the ancients as for 'primitive' peoples up to
the present time, myth and history cannot be separated, historical
events being valid, in their view, only to the extent that they
illustrate mythical themes. The modern historian, concerned to
discover what 'really' happened, has the unenviable task of trying
to separate the two, but for the ancients it was the myth the pre-—
temporal event —that was truly real, and happenings came about
only because the reverberations of this event determined the
patterns of time or— we if translate this into religious terms
— 'that
itmight be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets'. On the
one hand there is the view in terms of which the world could not
under any circumstances be thought of as separated from its
timeless source on the other a view which takes this separation
;

completely for granted.

In the personal life as in the wider context of world events
archaic man has considered the actions of daily life to be real only
if they fill out the contours of a pre-existent and harmonious mould.
There are certain ways of hunting (or, in agricultural communities,
of ploughing, sowing and reaping), certain ways of eating and
making love and constructing artifacts which are in accordance
with the heavenly precedents handed down myths and
in the
rituals of his people
— 'We must do what the gods did Then' — and
all other ways are disorderly and ultimately unproductive. His
thirst for the Real and his awareness that, if he commits himself to
trivialities, he must himself become trivial and lose the quality of
dignity, the quality of viceregality, dominates his faculties. In
all

the circumstances of our time, so far from our origins, it might

be said that he is defeated before he even starts, that the stream of

time now runs too fast and too fiercely to be resisted and that the
echoes which still reach him from 'That Time' are too dim to be
effectively obeyed. This may be so. But he lives on as a reminder
and as a sign for those who are prepared to understand.
The fact that archaic man is a survivor from a period when the

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 THE ONLY HERITAGE WE HAVE
conditions of human life were quite different to what they now are
makes it difficult for him to accept as natural misfortunes such as
sickness, infertility or accidental death which do not seem to us at
all mysterious in their origin. For him they indicate a disruption
of the harmony and order which still appear to him as normal,
since he retains, however dimly, some recollection of a time before
these ills had become the common lot of our kind, and he therefore
ascribes them to some disruptive act of witchcraft or to human
failure. This is not really so remote from the religious point of
view, which finds their cause in human sinfulness. For the 'primi-
tive' as, in a certain sense, for the Christian, we live commonly
under a curse, —
but the former because he has chosen to ignore
the changes which time has brought about is still surprised by —
this fact and tries to pin the fault on someone in his immediate
neighbourhood.
Still at home in the world, still trusting the environment (which

we see as something to be subdued and conquered), he assumes its

innocence and blames himself or others like himself for the ills to
which his flesh is prone. He does not see the rhythms of nature
as phenomena of time the alternations of day and night and the
;

changes of the lunar cycle and of the seasons are events which
happened once and for all in That Time, and his own life is inte-
grated into their pattern because he and they are aspects of a
single timeless order.
And because time does not appear to him as a continuous,
uninterrupted process, the changes which take place in the course
of his life are in the nature of mutations. We know of only one 'rite

of passage', the dreaded phenomenon of physical death, whereas

the life of archaic man is scattered with deaths and rebirths — rites
of naming, puberty, marriage and so on —each representing a
harsh severance from the past and a total break with the habits
and attachments of his former existence, so that he might be ex-
pected to re-emerge from the ritual moment into the light of com-
mon day with a new name and a new identity. In such a context
physical death cannot have the quality of uniqueness that it has

for us, but simply the greatest and most cataclysmic of the 'rites
is

of passage'. He does not need to think or talk in terms of a 'life

after death' since he is accustomed to regard every ending as the
necessary prelude to a new beginning. He himself, in this most
intimate selfhood, is projected into the primordial moment when
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 KING OF THE CASTLE
everything began, and every death, every break in continuity,
coincides with the primal sacrifice out of which time and multi-
plicitywere born into their fiery and self-consuming existence.
Rooted in a coherent world and free from the oppressive sense
of meaninglessness which time and multiplicity induce when they
are seen as self-subsisting, this man could scarcely be expected to
ask the questions we ask or to search high and low for a significance
which (in his experience) saturates both the common objects of
sense and the ordinary events which compose a human lifespan.
It is afundamental assumption of all traditional doctrines, whether
archaic or religious —however their outward forms may differ
that men have been provided not only with the mental, emotional
and sensory equipment necessary for them to be able to cope with
their worldly environment but also with answers to all the real
questions that can be asked. The question which remains un-
answered is the one which has been posed in the wrong terms.
These answers, however, are not of a kind to satisfy the question-
ing mind when it breaks loose from the personality as a whole and
demands that everything should be translated into its own specific
terms, nor can they be passed from hand to hand like coins. These
answers are bonds of connection between the individual and all
that is but because they relate not to the partial but to the whole
;

man it follows that the whole man must be apt to receive them if
they are to mean anything to him. Division and turbulence,
obscurity or falsity at any level of his being, will set barriers in the
way of total understanding for totality can only be comprehended
;

by totality Tt is not the eyes which grow blind. It is the hearts

:

within the breasts that grow blind', says the Quran.

Two quite different obstacles provide barriers to human under-
standing. The first (with which we are all well acquainted in our
age) is the technical difficulty of matters which require special
training and instruction combined with an active practical in-
telligence if they are to be grasped. In this case the barrier is
there for all to see. No one supposes that he can master a book on
nuclear physics merely because he is able to read.
The second obstacle is more subtle and perhaps more deceptive
since it relates to the understanding of statements, symbols
and stories which, on the surface, appear transparently simple and
wide-open even to the most naive and least instructed intelligence.
Like the tests which the traditional hero undergoes, but with a

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 THE ONLY HERITAGE WE HAVE
lessobvious challenge, they try each man's capacity to plumb the
depths of the truth offered to his understanding, but they also allow
those of small capacity to think they have grasped all that there is

to be grasped. In this sense they are, almost by definition, merciful,

in that they give to each as much as he is able to receive. But there
is always the danger that those who see only the concrete image,
the outer husk, and —thinking themselves intelligent — assume that
there is nothing more to be seen will dismiss such truths as being
too trivial to merit their further attention.
Of this attitude, which is the common one of our time both
towards the symbolic formulations of 'primitive' peoples and
towards the religious scriptures, one might say as the Jamaicans
do of a stupid man who supposes himself intelligent 'Him is so :

ignorant that him don't know him don't know.' The symbolic and
analogical modes of thought which were natural to our remote
ancestors and are still natural to certain archaic peoples are
regarded as primitive in the evolutionary sense of the term, that
is, as lacking in something that has since been acquired in the way
of understanding. People speak of 'pre-logical' modes of thought,
implying that those who employed such modes were incapable of
the full exercise of reason and therefore a little less than human.
There however, a totally different view that might be taken
is,

of such matters and of our modern incapacity to think in the

concrete and synthetic terms of symbols and analogy. According to
this view, the transformation of symbols into rational concepts and
into the ABC is to be regarded, not as an
of explicit doctrines
evolutionary advance, but as a concession to man's diminishing
aptitude for grasping any truth in its totality, its variety of aspects
and its suprarational richness and density of meaning. It is the
fool rather than the intelligent man who needs to have everything
explained to him.
As Frithjof Schuon has pointed out on a number of occasions,
the explicit doctrine is already inherent in the symbolic formulation.
Itsdeployment in terms of discourse and argument adds nothing to
itand can never exhaust its meaning. Indeed, when the majority
of people have begun to take symbols literally so that it becomes
necessary to state in conceptual form what was previously implicit,
there is an unavoidable impoverishment of meaning in the process
of fitting it to the rigid limitations of human language. In our time
learned men find it necessary to write whole books to explain the

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
significance of one symbol in all the variety of its implications.
'And if all the trees in the earth were pens and the sea, with seven
more seas to help it, were ink, the words of God could not be
exhausted.'*
Symbols are, in the first place, things. Our understanding of
them depends upon our capacity for seeing the elements of our
environment as they really are (or in terms of what they mean)
rather than as they appear in terms of human appetite. And the
essential truth, says Schuon, 'is that everything, each thing, each
energy by the fact that it exists represents a possible entry
. . .

towards the Real.'f The process whereby the environment gradu-

ally congeals or loses its quality of transparency, until things
are no more than objects which can either be put to practical use
or else be kicked aside when they get in our way, is the same as
the process whereby symbols are drained of meaning and reduced
to the level either of poetic allegory or of 'primitive science'. For
modern man, only the objects of sense appear unquestionably real,
while everything else is either 'subjective' or 'abstract'. For archaic
man, reality resides not in the object as such but in what it signi-
fies ;
stripped of this significance it is a shadowy thing on the verge
of non-existence.
We are free, being what we are, to regard such a view as false,

but we only make fools of ourselves if we dismiss it without even

troubling to ask what about and without considering if
it is all —
only for a moment —the we might be wrong. For
possibility that
this is the only heritage we have. Our human past has nothing else
to offer us. And before we resign ourselves to abject poverty (com-
forted, no doubt, by the forlorn hope that science will eventually
make us rich) we might do well to recall Pascal's question as to
whether the heir to a fortune would ever think of dismissing his
title-deeds as forgeries without troubling to examine them. Folly,
however, is more often the symptom of a vice than of a lack of
intelligence, and it is not uncommon
for arrogance to induce a
wilful blindness. If 'history bunk' and our human past a tale
is

of ignorance and superstition, then we might claim to be giants

but if we are the heirs of men who were nobler than us and knew
more than we do, then we are pygmies and must bow our heads in
shame.
* Quran, 31 127.
t Images de V Esprit: Frithjof Schuon, p. 100.

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 THE ONLY HERITAGE WE HAVE
There no virtue in the accumulation of factual knowledge for
is

its own once men have wandered outside the normal

sake, but
limitations of the knowledge that is useful to them in terms of
their spiritual and physical needs, then it becomes necessary, not
to bring them back to the limited perspective (which is impossible
since history cannot be reversed), but to balance the scraps of
knowledge they have picked up as a dog picks up stray bones with
an awareness of truths which set these scraps in their proper con-
text.
What possible relevance can the habits of some ancient people
or of an Australian aboriginal tribe have to the lives of people in
modern Europe or America? None, have strayed
until the latter
outside their own world and begun to concern themselves with
such things. But once this concern exists it may lead us to a region
—
of false ideas which devastate our homeland like deadly bacteria
—
brought back from outer space unless they can be rectified in
terms of a perspective wider than any that is provided by a purely
local viewpoint. If we insist upon knowing about things which are,
from the practical point of view, none of our business, then we
have to grow a few inches to accommodate this strange knowledge.
Otherwise our capacity for comprehending the world, our world,
as a whole that makes sense may burst at the seams.
The ordinary Christian of earlier times did not need to know
that God has spoken in many languages and through a great
variety of masks. The disturbing fact that the vessels in which this
Speech is preserved are necessarily relative in character was
irrelevant to his salvation, for he was securely lodged in a religious
context that fulfilled his real needs, answered his questions and
provided him with his bridge to eternity.
All that concerned him was to perfect and intensify his own way
to God, making use of the entirely adequate doctrinal and ritual
supports available to him. The knowledge that there existed alter-
native ways, equally effective for those to whose habits and pat-
terns of thought they were adjusted, could not have helped him in
this task. And if, through ignorance, he assumed that his own faith
was the only truth and that such others as he might hear of through
travellers' tales were necessarily false, this did no harm. It was
when the geographical barriers came down and the Europeans
first Christian and, later, ex-Christian —fanned out over the globe
that the situation changed radically.

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
'No blame can be attached to a person for attacking a foreign
Tradition in the name of his own it is done through
belief if
ignorance purely and simply', says Schuon 'when however this
;

is not the case, the person will be guilty of a blasphemy, since by

outraging the Divine Truth in an alien form he is merely profiting

by an opportunity to offend God without having to trouble his
own conscience. This is the real explanation of the gross and impure
zeal displayed by those who, in the name of religious conviction,
,#
devote their lives to making sacred things appear odious . . .

A study of certain aspects of Christian missionary endeavour sug-

gests that there was indeed a 'gross and impure zeal' at work. This
zeal has now been intensified in the service of the pseudo-religion
of progress.
So long as a particular religion is contained and insulated in its

own world (the frontiers of which have been determined by

geographical or racial factors), the arguments and dogmas upon
which the faith of the majority of believers is based can remain,
and
in the precise sense of the term, parochial. Their narrowness
any criticism founded upon a more sophisti-
their vulnerability to
cated knowledge (or more rigorous logic) than is provided by the
parish worthies does not matter so long as they are effective, that
is to say, if they open windows onto the truly universal. They can
only do this if they are —within the limits of certain terms of
reference —adequate representations of the truth, but such repre-
sentations do not need to be very subtle or very comprehensive so
long as they serve to awaken that which is already present at the
centre of man's being or, from another point of view, to open his
heart to the action of Grace.
But dogmas are particularly vulnerable to those who,
religious
instead of usingthem as stepping-stones to a forgotten but still
recoverable knowledge, sit down to examine and analyse their
structure. Dogmatic doctrine cannot be more than an aide-
memoire. It collapses when treated as though it were a scientific
statement, for what it represents cannot be stated in the way that
the laws which govern the movements of the planets or the forma-
tion of crystals are stated. The latter belong to our own level of
existence and may be expressed in the language of our kind,
whereas the truths towards which dogmas (like symbols) point
* The Transcendent Unity of Religions: Frithjof Schuon (Faber and
Faber), p. 28.

176
 THE ONLY HERITAGE WE HAVE
theway are not reducible to any of the dimensions of relativity.
They will not come down to us, except in the form of intimations
bait for the spirit not yet entirely submerged in the glassy depths.
It is we who are required to go to that central place where they
reside in their essential fullness. The certainty that we are able to
do this is among the basic certainties upon which the religions,
as well as the primordial doctrine, have built their castles. When
this is lost sight of —and the innermost room of the castle is locked
up — religion loses its raison d'etre and falls into decay.
And of course we lose sight of this certainty. It gets buried
under the debris of the centuries. But the innermost room is still
there and the lock will still turn though the key may be rusty for ;

the reservoir of grace which is the luminous centre of every Revela-

tion is timeless, immune from the process of decay which erodes
its temporal outworks. God does not retreat it is we who go away.:

Our absence (carried downstream from our spiritual home)

has been, according to traditional teaching, the occasion for the
great religious Revelations which, if they could not outwardly and
objectively restore the primordial harmony —for Paradise lost
is not regained at the same level of existence —at least made pos-
sible an inward and spiritual restoration which might be reflected
in the environment so far as the circumstances of the time per-
mitted and indeed the tales common to Christianity, Islam and
;

Buddhism of the transformation of matter (or of concord between

men and beasts) in the presence of the saints suggests that the
environment has been restored to something of its primordial
perfection at such moments. But the very fact that these moments
have to be described as miraculous reminds us that time goes on.
It is as ferry-boats equipped to carry men across the stream of
time (rather than as dams blocking the stream) that the world's
religions have provided the means of salvation. What men are to be
saved from is fragmentation, dismemberment and dispersal in
multiplicity, and what they stand to lose in such a process of
fragmentation is their real identity as human beings. The unity
which a particular religion imposes upon its people is necessarily
somewhat rigid, at least in its outward forms, but this is the
nature of ferries, and it is only as rigid structures that they can
serve their purpose. The fact that one religion forbids what
another permits, or that sexual and alimentary regulations are not
the same for all, in no way undermines the validity of these rules

177
 KING OF THE CASTLE
in their own context, as parts of a single, seaworthy structure which
has been built in the light of a particular religious perspective. The
perspective determines the blueprint and the method of construc-
tion, while the given environment provides the materials.
Those in our time who assert their right to approach God 'in
their own way' and condemn all organised religion seem unaware
that, even if they themselves are capable of making this approach
(as, in the nature of things, some few might be), they are also
asserting the right of other men to drown and perhaps condemning
them to drowning. The question one must ask is not whether the
possibility exists of a man breaking through to Reality on his own,
without the assistance of traditional supports and a religious
framework, but whether this in fact happens save in the most
exceptional cases. The answer to the first question would neces-
sarily be in the affirmative, since it deals only with possibilities and
'with God all things are possible'. But the second can only receive
a negative answer. what matters. Churches and temples are
This is

necessary, not because God

is what he is, but because we are what

we are. Though present everywhere, he is most easily found wher-

ever a particular religious crystallisation has, like a burning glass,
focused the rays of his Grace.
Such words as 'structure' and 'crystallisation' suggest some-
more concrete than an ideal or an aspiration. As we
thing rather
have seen, the life of archaic peoples is so thoroughly determined
by their myths, symbols and rituals that what happens outside this
sacred framework can hardly be said to exist. For them there can
be no opposition between sacred and profane, since they are
unacquainted with the profane. Given the conditions of a later
time and the increasing remoteness of our world from its divine
source, the world's religions have had to face this opposition,
although the extent to which they have acknowledged its existence
varies greatly. The orthodox Hindu has much in common with
archaic man and is scarcely aware of a profane sphere set over
against his ritual practice.The Muslim who still lives in a tight-knit
Islamic community knows the same cohesion of life-in-the-world
with religious life. The case of Christianity is quite different.
The Hindus never questioned the subordination of the temporal
power to the spiritual, and Islam brought its own corner of the
world under the divine Law revealed in the Quran. But Chris-
tianity came into being in a hostile environment which was there-

i
78
 THE ONLY HERITAGE WE HAVE
fore by definition profane. Unlike Hindus or Muslims, Christians
were immediately in contact with things that were not sacred and
had to compromise with the profane sphere (or suffer martyrdom).
Since the Christian religion did not contain within itself rules

of conduct and of political organisation such as are set out in the

Hindu scriptures and in the Quran, it had to assimilate much of its

worldly structure from the Hebraic environment into which was it

born and from the Roman environment in which it grew to

maturity. Even at the height of its power, when Christendom was
mighty and unified, a distinction was admitted between the
spiritual and the temporal (therefore profane) spheres which would
have seemed intolerable to Muslims at the time when the Islamic
civilisation was at its zenith.
It was always more natural to Christians than to others to sup-
pose that there were aspects of human life which lay outside the
immediate orbit of religion. These things could be kept in order
—
or neutralised so long as men acted as good Christians in relation
to them, but they did not in themselves belong to the sphere of the
sacred. Through this loophole, unimportant so long as the majority
of Westerners thought primarily in terms of being good Christians,
has crept the entirely profane world of our age which goes its own
way while permitting the survival of religion as a personal matter
so long as it does not interfere in more important domains.
Personal faith is one thing, religion another. The two are inti-
mately bound up with one another, but the distinction must be
made. A man may pursue a spiritual path in isolation from his
social and economic environment, but the very idea of religion
implies the incorporation of the public realm in a spiritually
determined pattern so that not just a man but all men are assisted
towards their goal by everything they do and everything they touch
in the normal course of their daily lives. The ferry-boat is a world
in itself, an ark supplied with all the necessities of life.
Things break away. First one aspect of living claims autonomy,
then another, building themselves their own little ships but ;

these are ships constructed for sailing downstream, in accordance

with the direction of time, not for crossing over. Politics, science,
industry, art and literature go their way, each proudly independent
of everything except the current itself and their own increasing
momentum. Until finally one more little ship is added to the
flotilla calling itself, perhaps, 'Religion Adapted to the Needs of

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
Our Time', equipped with certain regulations governing the per-
sonal life and a cargo of ideals. Somehow it never quite manages
to keep up with the rest. Possibly some memory tugs at it, against
the pull of the stream, or the strangeness of its cargo sets it apart.

To question the usefulness of any attempt to adapt religion to

what are supposed to be the needs of our time is not to decry
the intrinsic value of personal piety or, indeed, to underestimate
the nobility of those who live a Christian life' in the contemporary
context ; what is questionable is the propriety of diluting truth for
the sake of meeting error halfway and of applying evolutionary
theory to the marks of eternity embedded in the matrix of the
temporal world. To put the point bluntly, if God wished to speak
to the modern world it may be supposed that he would find a way
of doing so. There is a limit to how far men can go in interpreting
the divine Word in terms of a language from which all the appro-
priate words have been excluded. If people have gone away from
the central place that is home, then charity requires that
their real
they should be shown the To imagine one can take the
way back.
centre out to —
them while they stay where they are is folly. —
The effort to make religion —
and in this case it is Christianity
with which we are specifically concerned —acceptable to as many
people as possible has a way of defeating its own
This has object.
happened to a striking degree in the Protestant countries, where
Christianity has too often been reduced to a matter of morality
and idealism. But there are two quite separate factors which come
together to undermine faith.
In the first place, there has been the refusal to admit that the
very structure of contemporary life excludes religion, being profane
in root and branch, and that there is no way in which Christianity
could be integrated into this structure as it stands. Almost every-
thing that is said and done in the modern world implicitly assumes
the non-existence of any other dimension than the profane one.
People imagine that this merely represents an attitude of neutrality
towards religion. They are wrong. To exclude religion is to deny
it, for all religion stands or falls on the claim that divine reality

cannot be excluded from any corner of existence. The more real

takes precedence over the less real; it dominates the latter. In
order for that which is less real to escape this subordination it must
refuse to recognise that there is any other reality but its own. A

1 80
 THE ONLY HERITAGE WE HAVE
dreamer cannot hold onto his dream by telling himself that it is
just as real as waking life he can do so only by keeping his eyes
;

closed and refusing to wake up.

Secondly, Protestants have to a large extent cast aside the meta-
physical and intellectual heritage of Christianity for the sake of
appealing to 'ordinary' people, and the Catholic Church now seems
ready to follow their example. These 'ordinary' people may not be
greatly concerned with intellectual considerations, but those from
—
whom they take their cue those who, in the long run, tell them
—
what to think are very much concerned with these considerations.
There is a bitter irony here Christianity has been simplified and
;

de-intellectualised to make it more attractive to the majority, but

instead of gratefully accepting this watered-down religion, the
majority have looked to the more sophisticated and more intel-
lectually demanding minority for guidance. The latter, after one
glance at the pap that is offered, have rejected it.
This is, in itself, an over-simplification. There are members
of the intellectual elite who have gone to the trouble of rediscover-
ing the metaphysical roots of the Christian religion and have
become convinced of its truth, while others have been content to
go down on their knees in simple faith before the mysterium
tremendum and have been surprised by joy. But it cannot be denied,
particularly in this age of mass media, that a Church which does
not or will not appeal to the leaders of opinion must sooner or later
lose the masses. In our time the ignorance of Christian doctrine
and of Christian symbolism displayed by otherwise highly edu-
cated people is so abysmal that one must assume they were never
told anything more of Christianity than a simple-minded mis-
sionary might see fit to tell supposedly simple 'savages'. They
cannot be said to have rejected religion. They have never heard of
it.

Christianity or, for that matter, any other religion is completely

at the mercy of the view (understood in the
scientific point of
crudest sense) as soon as its metaphysical and mystical dimensions
are forgotten. But what is attacked and so easily destroyed is the
religion of tiny tots, Sunday School Christianity. And the attack
is met with Sunday School arguments which never dare to hint

that terror encompasses a world which goes astray and that man is
never a forgotten creature who might slip away into the com-
fortable darkness unobserved.

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
Although God has said to the Islamic world, 'My Mercy takes
precedence over my
Wrath', Muslims have never imagined that
Wrath is abolished by its ultimate subordination to an all-embrac-
ing Mercy. Christianity however has drifted —partly in reaction
to the hell-raising fulminations of preachers in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries —into a which God is
situation in
defined entirely in terms of the nicest human qualities, and
anthropomorphic symbolism, true and necessary in its proper
context, is taken so literally that it become indefensible. From this
has come the bitterness of those who are unable to forgive God
for not being a Christian as they were taught to understand the
term, the anger of men betrayed by those whom they most trusted,
the pathetic blasphemies of people who —seeing a sick world
around them —ascribe its creation to a sick deity while, in the same
breath, denying that any deity exists. Meanwhile, the gentle teach-
ers of the good go gently on their way.
child's religion
Since the perfect man was
created in the image of God, it
follows that his very existence proved the human Face of God and
justifies the use of anthropomorphic images. But we go beyond
thisand tend to ascribe the qualities and limitations of fallen
humanity to the deity, reducing the Absolute to humanoid pro-
portions.
From the Catholic point of view, Thibon has written eloquently
concerning 'the simple tale of the creation of God by man'.
Dazzled by transcendence and otherness, it is natural that we
should try to confine the divine nature within the most accessible
of its multitudinous aspects and envisage God as Man writ large.
The tiger no doubt knows a tigerish deity, and among men it is

only those who have

sloughed off the impediments of humanity
and achieved within themselves a kind of total nudity who may
know God otherwise than through their own image but what is ;

seen through this tinted glass is nonetheless there (for there is

nothing positive that is not there), and the humanised image serves
as a bridge to a region beyond all created images, provided it is
recognised as a bridge.
The danger is that it may be mistaken for a stopping-place
rather than a point of departure,and this is a danger to which
Christianity in modern times seems to have been particularly
exposed. Europeans have always been rather simple minded (as
were the ancient Romans) and peculiarly inclined to take the sym-

182
 THE ONLY HERITAGE WE HAVE
bol for the thing symbolised, attempting to reduce all that is to
manageable proportions. They have finally reduced the Absolute
to the dimensions of an Old Man in the Sky and are horrified to
discover what a useless (and amoral) Old Man this is.
It is time to remember our heritage and to become alert to the
ancient wisdom, to look upwards and to look within. The answers
are always there, undisturbed by time, in the primordial gift of
reminiscence, in all that is above us and, here and now, within our
own deepest selfhood. We have only to look in the right direction.
 8
WHAT WE ARE AND
WHERE WE ARE
Contemporary thought dismisses as naive or childish a great many
of the beliefs which our ancestors regarded as essential elements of
Christianity ; is one particular notion which has been cast
but there
aside in anger and indignation. This is the doctrine that human
acts have repercussions far beyond the frontiers of the human
world and may provoke, in the very nature of things, reactions
which our language defines in terms of punishment and suffering.
In earlier times the process whereby these consequences come
home to roost was seen as a divine Judgment and this suffering was
—
described in the picturesque imagery necessarily borrowed from
the conditions of our —
own familiar world of the pains of hell.
How could the God of the Sunday Schools allow his decent,
well-meaning children to suffer in perpetuity for faults and weak-
nesses which are 'only human' and which, in any case, very often
derive from environmental factors rather than from the ill will of
the sinner ? Obviously he could not. But then one is logically com-
pelled to ask how he can permit many other things which do,
undeniably, exist war and oppression, the early death of loved
:

ones, cancer and the wide spectrum of mental and physical

'handicaps'. If, as no one can deny, people suffer pain and grief
in this world, then it is clearly illogical to maintain —
as do some
—
modern Christians that God could not permit suffering to exist
elsewhere.
Muslims, although by no means immune to modernism, have on
the whole had less difficulty in reconciling the vicissitudes of
earthly existence both with the divine Power and with the divine
Mercy. They have been less disposed to fall into the trap which
awaits those who push anthropomorphic symbolism to its extreme
limit. 'Glorified be God with a Glory remote from all representa-
tions of him ' this is one of the basic themes of Islam. Remote
:

184
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
from the representation of a good man writ large and infinitely
remote from the Dear Old Man in the Sky. Being human we have
need of images as rungs on a ladder leading to That which is ulti-
mately without image, incomparable but when we try to rest too
;

heavily upon these supports their provisional character becomes

apparent.
The made countless men and women turn round,
fear of hell has
and move towards it when, but for this fear,
face their true goal
they might have wandered away into the shadows. If fear sets a
man on the path to safety and towards the recognition of his real
identity, then fear has a useful function and, since human respon-
;

sibility exists and acts do have owners to whom their consequences

relate, there are indeed things to be feared (who, among the living,
could doubt this ?) and there no deception in the imagery of fire
is

and brimstone. It is, however, an imagery that suggests punish-

ment coming exclusively from outside ourselves, quite alien to all
that we are. In an age in which men are already profoundly alienated
from their roots and from their world, this imagery threatens a
further alienation, not because it is inherently false but because
it is readily misunderstood by those who have lost all sense of
unity and inter-connection.
Since the idea of responsibility carries little weight if it is con-
fined entirely to the social realm and since any extension of respon-
sibility beyond realm implies that supernatural consequences
this
attach to human we need to be reminded that, in religious
acts,
terms, we are judged, not by some alien despot who rules or —
—
misrules the universe, but by the Norm inherent within us.
Tire will invade, envelop all,' says Thibon, writing from the
Catholic point of view 'All will be judged from within and, so to
:

say, by its own self'.* 'Whosoever sins, sins only against himself/f
says the Quran and again, 'Read thy book. Thy soul suffices as a
;

reckoner against thee this day.' J In every religious context we find

the doctrine that divine Judgment (under whatever name it goes)
is more nor less than the stripping away of every kind of
neither
falsehood and self-deception, with a consequent exposure of what
we really are. Our identity had been mercifully veiled from us
this was our freedom and our opportunity to exercise responsibility

* UEchelle de Jacob: Gustave Thibon, p. 94.

tQuran, 4:3.
% Quran, 17: 14.

185
 KING OF THE CASTLE
within our own field —but at the last the veils are drawn away, the
comedy is over, and we face ourselves.
Our actions are the outward sign of what we are. This is their
chief significance and this is why a change in a man's basic nature
'repentance' — is said to free him from the burden of his past sins,

however black they may have been. Those who regard as absurd
the notion that a man could deserve supernatural punishment for
some apparently trivial sin are right, so long as the situation is

defined in this way. But it is not the sin that is punished. It is the
profound inner warping which betrayed itself through this sin that
stands revealed —and is to be measured against the Norm when —
time and obscurity are brought to an end.
And yet our acts can never be disowned, any more than we can
disown our limbs. 'This Day', says the Quran, We seal up mouths;
4

and hands speak out and feet bear witness to their acts.'* As was
suggested earlier, the distinction commonly made between a
hard core of individuality and the web of action within which it
operates is a convenient but superficial distinction. The person
as a whole, as the manifestation of a particular pattern in time and
space, is not subject to chance or accident whatever happens
;

to him and — most important of all, in view of contemporary

efforts to exempt from responsibility those who act 'under orders'
— everything in which he takes part is an aspect of his total nature.
The paradox in which human reason can find no reconciliation
lies in the fact that this total nature, though already complete

—
beyond our existential context, is from our point of view and in
—
our experience in the process of formation, still malleable, still
alterable. And our experience represents something inherent in the
nature of reality. We do not merely have an illusion of freedom.
We are free, but only relatively so. Absolute freedom is a quality
that belongs to God alone.
There is no need to labour this riddle, for no amount of twisting
and turning in the corridors of reason will solve it but the empha-;

sis upon experience —

our consciousness of happenings, together
—
with the ideas and feelings which they provoke is essential to an
understanding of what the traditional doctrines have meant by
'hell'. 'The damned souls are in Paradise', said Simone Weil, 'but

for them Paradise is Hell'. It is in rather the same paradoxical

spirit that the Zen Buddhists tell us that this present world of
* Quran, 36 64.
:

186
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
space and time (and suffering) is none other than the timeless
Nirvana. Hell is not a locality but a state of being and therefore,
in our terms, a state of experience. The experience, perhaps, of
the intractably imperfect in the presence of the Norm from which
it has departed and to which it refuses to return. The damned soul,
says Thibon, is 'an essentially refractory being, for ever consumed
by flame and for ever powerless to become flame.'
Hell an alienation so extreme that the only way in which the
is

damned can experience their own totality is in terms of pain. Like

the madman convinced that the person who loves him most is his
deadliest enemy or like the victim of hydrophobia who dies in an
agony of thirst though water is at hand, the damned are meshed
in an evil dream which disguises the most benign objects in shapes
of terror and malignancy. This infernal state is the result (from our
point of view, here and now) of a misuse of our relative freedom, a
refusal not only to be what we are —
in terms of our Norm but —
also to accept the burden imposed upon us as responsible beings
and to face the fact that our actions and their consequences have a
significance far beyond the narrow field in which they are initiated.
'Since we are "not other" than the Self,' says Schuon, 'we are
condemned to eternity. Eternity lies in wait for us, and that is
why we must find again the centre, that place where eternity is
blessedness. Hell is the reply to the rim which makes itself centre
or to the multitude which usurps the glory of Unity it is the reply ;

of Reality to the ego which wants to be absolute .' We are con-

. .

demned to totality because no amount of wishful thinking and no

amount of theorising, no sheltering under the earth's weight and
no act of self-destruction, can make us less than we are. We can
only pretend to be other than viceregal creatures with a viceregal
responsibility, and this is the pretence that is to be stripped away
on the Day of Judgment.
According to Martin Buber, 'The greatest evil is to forget that
thou art the son of a King'. This forgetfulness is closely bound up
with the desire of the human 'ego' to set itself up as a false absolute
(on however petty a scale), which is why it has even been suggested
that hell contains only those who prefer to be where they are and
reject the offer of release. So it is sometimes said in Islam that the
souls in hell enjoy, each of them, some particular pleasure or
apparent advantage which roots them in their condition of misery,
unwilling to break out of this dark dream and face the light.

i8 7
 KING OF THE CASTLE
In denying or forgetting his viceregal identity his divine —
ancestry —man loses a dimension of his being, but through this
amputation he gains an illusion of self-sufficiency and of freedom
from responsibility, a robber baron who no longer recognises that
his castle is held in fief and that he has an account to render. This
deceptive freedom has made possible the development of contem-
porary science and technology and has led to the unprecedented
exploitation of the natural world (both animate and inanimate). It
has enabled modern man to commit monstrous crimes against his
fellows and against his environment (therefore ultimately against
himself) without any awareness of guilt so long as he has been
acting as massman, as a member of an organised multitude 'doing
his duty'. Yet this has in no way freed him from an obsessive sense
of guilt in his personal life, as an individual acting alone, indeed
there has never been a greater fear of taking risks than there is
among the bourgeoisie of our time.
The exercise of human responsibility may well involve the
readiness to take tremendous risks and to assume an unavoidable
burden of guilt ; but this burden is intolerable only so long as we
refuse to see it our existence. The soldier who
as a condition of
kills because he is commanded to do so and the civil servant

administering regulations which cause harm and suffering imagine

—
themselves exempt from responsibility 'I didn't make the rules !

— without being able to say to whom their acts belong, if not to

themselves, and imagining that so long as they are in uniform or
dressed for the office they are less than men.
Do they suppose that responsibility rests solely with those who
give them their orders? They are servants of God, not of their
fellow men and if they obey their fellow men this is their choice,
;

and the responsibility is theirs. T had no power over you,' says

Satan in the Quran, 'except that I called to you and you obeyed
me so blame me not, but blame yourselves.'*
;

The Christian tradition has given an intensely emotional flavour

to ideas of sin and guilt, partly by taking the view that the sinner is
hurting a loving Saviour through such acts of disobedience and
partly by the emphasis it has placed upon the fatherhood of God,
so that emotions derived from childhood situations attach to the
sins of the adult. This emotional attitude, perfectly in place within

* Quran, 14: 22.

188
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
the body of the Church, has persisted among those who no
are
longer Christians and for whom, therefore, there can be no con-
no expiation and no forgiveness. In the Christian
fession, guilt
may be an aspect of health in the ex-Christian it is often a
; sick-
ness.
Awareness of guilt in the sense of a personal, intellectual recogni-
tion of what we are and where we are is the beginning of realism
and of the knowledge that we are responsible beings. But guilt as
an emotional condition tends to be at once paralysing (so far as the
individual is concerned) and destructive (in terms of human
relationships) it is in essence a feeling of alienation. Whereas the
;

intellectual awareness of guilt is essentially a recognition that we

are not what we should be that we misuse our powers and misrule
;

our kingdom. In Christianity it is bound up with the knowledge

of an original sin constantly sustained, in Islam with the knowledge
that the compact made by all souls 'when they lay within Adam's
loins' has been broken, and in Hinduism with the doctrine of
'karma' and of the chain of actions and reactions which has brought
us to this twilight place. To say that we should be better than we
are reduces the question to the level of moralism and sentimentality.
What we should be is other than we are, more truly ourselves in
terms of our own Norm.
But since we can only start from where we are and only initiate
action in the place in which we find ourselves, it is as sick men that
we begin our work and the world with which we have to deal is a
ruined paradise. Perfection is under the circumstances
far off and,
in which good is inextricably mixed with ill and every light pro-
jects a shadow, none but the saints can act responsibly without
incurring some further burden of guilt.
What is required of us is not that we should try to achieve an
impossible purity of action but that we should learn to discriminate
between the relative goods presented to us as our field of operation,
situating each thing in its place and at its proper level in the total
order, reconnecting where connection has been broken and re-
uniting where unity has been shattered. This we can do only if
we are prepared to understand our real situation and, at the same
time, to turn our faces towards our own true centre and, by focus-
ing our attention upon it, begin to draw the scattered elements of
our present circumstances towards it.

189
 KING OF THE CASTLE
Man is committed two journeys (or to journeying
at birth to
on two different levels). The
he cannot escape, for this is the
first

journey of action and experience as he travels down the stream

of his own lifetime and creates, as a man of his period (localised in
time and space), a story which expresses, in this particular mode,
his ultimate identity or the human possibility which is the reason
for his existence.
The second journey, which can — at least in a certain sense
be avoided, is upstream, using time and locality only as starting
points, leadingbeyond their zone. This is the journey described in
countless myths and legends, the arduous, perilous way towards
the centre of being, the passage from the ephemeral and illusory
towards the eternally real. In terms of universal myths, it was to
provide a landscape for this journey that the monster 'Chaos' was
slain and an ordered world raised from the waters, and it was to
provide a negotiable way through this landscape that the prophets
laboured, Christ died and Muhammad led the people of the City
into battle in the Arabian wastes.
In a normal society7 the circumstances of the first journey pro-
vide supports for the second, and was man's aim in the past
it

to build and maintain a physical and social environment in which

every element had a dual character, existing as a 'thing' in terms of
the first journey, standing as a symbol and signpost in terms of the
second.
For a very long time now the routes of these two journeys have
been diverging, and it is not by chance that the last of the great,
world-transforming Revelations laid such particular emphasis
upon the duty of pilgrimage. The pious Muslim on his way to
Mecca is like a dancer who, by the steps he takes towards the
physical symbol of all centrality, acts out the drama of his own
inner, timeless journey, just as, in his obligatory prayers, he
creates a tiny area of consecrated territory —confined to the
—
dimensions of his prayer-mat in an environment that has become
almost totally profane. From this point of view it might be said
that the sacred rules of Islam were specially designed to protect
the traveller in a world which no longer offers him any foothold.
But the fact that the two paths have now diverged so far that
they can scarcely any longer be related to each other is not, in the
last analysis, a senseless accident. The human world, being what

it is, could only decay in the course of time, but, since decay is

190
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
itself a necessary aspect of a larger pattern and since there are
possibilitieswhich can only find existential expression in such a
context as ours, thisis where we belong. We live out our lives here

and now (rather than in some paradisal environment) because it is

our nature to be where we are. And we are told that there are com-
pensations available to such as us which were not available to the
less degenerate men of earlier times. 'You are in an age in which, if
you neglect one-tenth of what is ordered, you will be condemned,'
the Prophet of Islam told his Companions, 'but after this a time will
come when he who observes one-tenth of what is now ordered will
be saved.'
Modern man is weak, not to say feeble, and he is at the same
time subject to pressures and to temptations unknown to the people
of earlier times. Moreover he lives in an environment so hostile to
religion and to the sacred in its terrestrial forms that divine Justice
must allow for this and we cannot be judged by the standards which
might fairly be applied to our ancestors, living, as they did, in an
environment in which it was 'natural' to be religious. But if the
wind is tempered to the shorn lamb and if we have a quite special
claim to Mercy, there is still one vice, sin or crime which excludes
the possibility of forgiveness, and this is refusal of the Mercy
offered us. One might say that we are like drowning men to whom
a hand is held out. If we refuse to recognise this hand for what it is
and will not grasp it, then there is no hope for us.
The great revealed religions and the truths inherent in the
ancient traditions of humanity are, by definition, 'a mercy to man-
kind'. So, to a lesser degree, are the saints and men of true piety.
So also is the sacred in all its ramifications, whether in the form
of temples and sanctuaries built by hand or in the splendour and
beauty of virgin nature. To scorn sanctity when we find it among
men or to defile the sacred is therefore the gravest form of what
Christians call the sin against the Holy Ghost. It is to trample
Mercy underfoot.
Here, in human terms, we meet with a paradox. The relative
can make no impact upon the Absolute. Man, however much he
may blaspheme or rebel, can do no injury to God. But the mani-
festations of Mercy in this world are, of necessity, more fragile
than their author. The sacred is vulnerable. We have to tread very
carefully upon this earth, for it is scattered with the signs of divine
Mercy. We have to be aware of the wonders that surround us and
 KING OF THE CASTLE
take care not to damage them, both for our own sakes and for the
sake of others who might find their salvation here or there, among
the little things which are so easily destroyed.
On hand there are these 'little things' in which Mercy
the one
lies on the other, the daily trivialities which seem
half-concealed ;

so important to the men of our time and which they cherish with
blind devotion. What is required of us is an act of discrimination
between gold and straw, between sacred and profane required ;

of us precisely because it is our nature to be capable of this act. And,

in a world encumbered with distractions, such discrimination
becomes increasingly necessary. The further the world moves
—
from its source and is stripped or appears to be stripped of —
supernatural meaning, the greater the necessity to concentrate our
attention upon essentials. For creatures who are here so short a
time, whose powers decay just as they are learning to use them and
who die long before they are ready to go, there cannot be many
essentials. In our situation very little matters, but that little matters
enormously.
The complexity of modern life is a surface complexity in that
most of the strands which compose it are woven from artificial

needs, unreal obligations, trivial ambitions and, above all, glossy

but unsatisfying substitutes for the few things really necessary to
the accomplishment of the human journey (in either of its aspects).
The hostility of all religions to 'riches', their praise of 'poverty',
is to be understood primarily in a spiritual sense and is closely
related to archaic man's indifference to actions and events which
do not bear the stamp of That Time, the stamp of eternity. In both
cases it is the unreal — —
or the less real that is to be feared in so far
as it threatens to dissipate man's energies (and his capacity for
giving attention) in the wilderness of quantity. And it is precisely
by giving the whole weight of our attention —an attention so
powerful that it is said to be capable of penetrating the veils which
hide the light of heaven from us —upon the realm of quantity and
we have been able to build the scientific and tech-
relativity that
nologicalwonders of our age.
Anyone, any race, could have done it, given the willingness to
make the Faustian sacrifice upon which the whole edifice depends.
It happened to be the Europeans who first turned their backs upon
the light in order to conjure marvels out of the darkness, but other
races have lost no time in following suit ; the notion that it is pos-

192
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
sible to have the best of both worlds is ludicrous, since human
attention cannot be focused in two opposite directions.
In the long run, we can get no effective purchase on quantity.
We are real and need to be matched with reality, whereas the realm
of quantity (as opposed to the world of unique and significant
objects) becomes increasingly shadowy as we pursue it down the
corridors of time. The danger lies in the fact that the more shadowy
and unrewarding this realm becomes, the more feverish is our
pursuit of a satisfaction which constantly eludes us and the more
involved we become in haste and hullabaloo. The search for pleni-
tude in the region of number, the pursuit of reality among husks
and fragments which have become no more than units in a num-
bered sequence, is dissipation, and its final outcome can only be a
fierce and despairing destructiveness. Everything disappoints and
so everything must be punished for not giving us the satisfaction
we crave. The thirst for the Absolute which is inherent in human
nature is focused with a terrible and distorting power upon the
partial and the fragmentary, and under the blaze of this attention
even the most harmless objects are twisted into monstrous shapes,
as though the sun were concentrated upon them through a burning
glass.
Simone Weil speaks of the 'monotony of evil', and monotony

is one of the chief characteristics of the realms of quantity

—
'Nothing new all here is equivalent.' Evil as we know it in action
is closely bound up with certain typical reactions to monotony

on the one hand an almost manic overvaluation of particular

relative goods for their own sake and, on the other, boredom and
despair in the face of a state of existence without grandeur and
without ultimate significance. The man who clothes trivial things
in splendour and projects upon them his huge appetite for the real
and the truly important is, in fact, father to the disillusioned cynic
who perceives the hollowness of all such inflated goods but does
not know how to go beyond this perception and refill the empty
gourds. Thus we gravitate between an idealism which refuses to
face facts and a cynicism incapable of penetrating beneath the
surface of the factual.
Given the peculiar conditions of our time, there is a need for
disillusionment. Illusions are sticky things and hold a man in
their web, content when he should be discontented, happy to be
where he is and unaware that any further journeying is required

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
of him. In other periods, in protected environments, a certain
optimism, a certain tendency to see the best in everything and to
ignore the worm in the apple, did no harm at all but in our case, ;

hemmed in by so many
and led astray by phantoms, a
illusions
recognition that the profane world as such is 'a tale told by an
idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing' may be the begin-
ning of wisdom and recall certain men to their responsibility for
re-consecrating a desecrated environment.
But disillusionment when it is entirely passive, and when it

represents little more than the angry disappointment of the greedy

'ego', issues only in despair. And despair, in the sense of a dead-
end and a profound alienation from destiny, is more
to journeying
common than might be supposed. 'Mon cas n'est pas unique j'ai :

peur de mourir et je suis navree de'tre au monde.'* The term

'navre' suggest something more subtle than grief. It suggests the
boredom and disappointment of the soul which finds only mono-
tony where it looked for splendour and dry wells where water
should have flowed. But despair is not necessarily a state of con-
stant unhappiness. There are a great number of men and women in
our time who are quite without hope, in the Christian sense of the
word, seeing only grey days ahead and a meaningless extinction
when the grey days are done, but who are reasonably happy most
of the time, find a certain satisfaction in their families and friend-
ships and an even greater satisfaction in their work.
Yet they lead lives of quiet despair and are happy only on
condition that they discipline their minds to reject disturbing or
'morbid' thoughts. Less enterprising —perhaps less courageous
than those who seek satisfaction in danger, narcotics or sexual
adventures, they are determined to make the best of a bad job.
But this is not good enough, and under such sober and sensible
attitudes there runs a current of bitterness which comes to the
surface when certain notes are struck or when quite trivial ambi-
tions are thwarted. It is in this context that ambition is so danger-
ous ; not so much the great ambition which is focused upon power
and glory, but the little ambitions which are adjusted to the rungs
of a promotional ladder or to 'keeping up with the Joneses'. In the
first place, these offer a palliative to despair at times when despair
should be squarely faced and transcended. Secondly, they force a

* Opening words of the novel La Bdtarde by Violette Leduc.

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 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
man to take seriously occupations so trifling as to be unworthy of
his full attention. Thirdly, they lead ever further into the realm
of quantity, their goal a will-o'-the-wisp that constantly recedes.
And finally they provide a handle by which men are all too readily
manipulated.
In a highly competitive society trivial ambitions force us to
devoteall that we have it in us to give —
and more than we have
—
any right to give to entirely local and profane tasks. A man
cannot serve two masters. Our energies are limited (and our time
is short), which is why they have to be contained and directed and

why the human communities of earlier times were concerned that

the tasks of the practical life should reflect and even embody the
spiritual or ritual work through which we make our way towards
the central place.
When the activities which keep the community in being, keep
the wheels turning and provide for men's basic needs, take on the
character of distractions, when they are irrelevant to any purpose
beyond the immediate, practical one, then becomes important
it

that people should be frequently distracted from distraction (as,

for example, the Muslim is by the prayers which interrupt his
day's work) if they are not to be completely absorbed into natural
process. We do not have the right to use ourselves up in profane
tasks unless under the spur of hunger or some equally urgent
natural necessity.
It may be said that there is nothing to prevent a man combining
intense spiritual concentration with an extremely active life in
the world ;
many of the saints, both Christian and Muslim, have
done so. But this is quite beyond the capacities of the majority of
people, and a view which ignores the incapacities of the majority is

a totally impractical view. The social factors which compel the

majority to give their best to their jobs compel them also to ignore
everything outside and beyond these jobs. This being so, the price
we pay for the comforts and advantages of contemporary civilisa-
tion is too high. We cannot afford them.
Perpetuating into adult young child's competitiveness
life the
among which a man's position depends
his siblings, a society in
entirely upon his own efforts and talents (and in which these efforts
and talents must be fully applied throughout his working life) is
precisely the kind of society required if all our energies are to be
exploited in the production of social wealth. But this can only be

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
a society in which all values are subordinated to the productive
process. No one can rest without falling behind in the race but it ;

is only in rest from activities of this kind that a man can pursue
the 'second journey' or, in Christian terms, take care of his own
salvation. And only by turning his
back upon the realm of quantity
and of quantitative rewards so that he faces the centre, the human
Norm, can he exercise the responsibility which as king of his —
—
small castle he is born to exercise.
Compromise is possible in many and the paradoxical
fields,

nature of the world from heaven, and yet

itself (so far distant

not-other-than heaven in its ultimate essence) makes compromise a

condition of human living. But there is one matter in which no
compromise is possible. We are not two-headed creatures, we
cannot face two ways at once, and sooner or later we have to choose
in which direction our basic attention is to be focused. In the end
it is not in terms of relative good or relative evil that a man is

judged, but in terms of the direction in which he faces.

The fact that we are creatures made for choosing is no longer

apparent to the majority of people. As has already been suggested,
the modern world dominated by a sense of fatality, the kind of
is

fatality inherent in natural processes, and those who find fault with
it do so chiefly on the grounds that it is not all it might be in terms

of its own aims and ideals. Bettelheim's view that we have a simple
choice between renouncing freedom and giving up the comforts of
modern technology is not widely shared, difficult though it is to
ignore the evidence that the free society and the technological
society are mutually incompatible.
Living so much closer to the operations of cause and effect than
we do and believing in supernatural rewards and punishments as
the ultimate repercussions of the choice they made in the course of
their lives, our ancestors could not doubt the significance of their
own decisions. We have no such certainty. Believing that the con-
sequences of what we do are confined to our own locality, and
overwhelmed by the complexity of this place in which we find
ourselves, we interpret significance in quantitative terms and
value action only as a contribution to some form of corporate
achievement.
This is bound to be the case so long as we regard ourselves as no
more than clever animals dwarfed by the immensity of a hostile

196
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
universe and as self-contained units dwarfed by the multitude.
It seems that the decisions which shape the only world in which we
believe are made by a very few people and that our contribution
is at most an infinitesimal fraction of the decisive act.

It is not that we deliberately reject the normal, traditional view

that one man's action may shake the very fabric of the heavens and
the earth, that the descendant of Adam (before whom, according to
the Quran, the angels were commanded bow down) cannot be
to
merely a contributor, and that our responsibility is to God alone.
There is no occasion to reject it, since people have forgotten that it
was ever normal to our kind. This is the measure of our diminution
from man to manikin, from priest-king to monkey.
The world overwhelms us by sheer size and multiplicity. Our
environment crushes us. We are faceless in a mob which numbers
billions. Yet all this matches with perfect correspondence the
beliefs and mental climate of our time. The whole fabric of our
world is, in a very real sense, a projection of our ideology and of
what we are within ourselves. It exists because it is, basically, what
we want; or, to state this more accurately, it is the objective
crystallisation of our wants and of their inevitable consequences.
It is the desert which faces those who turn their backs upon the
Mountain. A single centrifugal force is at work both within the
most intimate recesses of our nature and throughout the theatre
in which our life's experience unfolds.
This process is, in one sense, inevitable. In another sense it can
proceed only by our permission. The traditional doctrines saw
creation itself as a centrifugal process moving ever further from its

centre, outwards into the wilderness, downwards into the abyss,

until it reaches its limit ('a fraction of a degree above absolute
zero') and is, in cataclysmic fashion, caught up, redeemed, brought
back. The process is necessary because there are elements in the
totality of Perfection which can only manifest themselves in distant
places, like small lights which could never be seen in the neigh-
bourhood of the sun, and there are values which are made com-
plete only when tested among the fragments of a dissolving world.
But, according to these same doctrines, man is made not only for
choosing but also for returning and for bringing back. He alone
of all that is created can maintain a direct connection with the
centre and, by penetrating the thickening layers of cloud, remain
aware of sunlight. So long as he holds to this, his viceregal function,

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
the fragments are kept whirling in meaningful patterns. Only when
he lets go can chaos come again.
What the Muslims call the Holy War is in fact the opposition
of the unified and God-centred man to the forces of dissipation
and chaos both within and outside himself. Such warfare is likely,
in our times, to provide a history of defeatsand failures at least —
so far as our environment taken as a whole is concerned—but this
is precisely why we are told that less is expected of us than was

expected of the men of earlier periods. Defeat does not matter,

because it is by fighting this war that we become what we are, and
the achievement of integrity is not dependent upon the quantita-
tive and temporal outcome of the struggle. Our concern is only
with doing what we are capable of doing. The rest is out of our
hands.
Defeat is one thing, abdication another. And despair grows
out of abdication rather than out of defeat. 'What is the good of
. .', 'What is the use of
. .', are the catchwords of an age which
. .

measures everything in terms of immediate and seemingly objec-

tive success. We have the presumption to believe that we can fore-
see the ultimate effects of our actions, and this belief makes us
impotent. Deprived in this way of our true function as men, there
is nothing to prevent our being carried away downstream with the

other debris of a broken world.

Ours is not a time for impotence. The events of the past fifty
years suggest that the process to which Western man committed
himself some centuries ago speeding up at an
all but uncon-
is

trollable rate —
and that the moment the point of no return on the
—
curve of progression beyond which no real choice will be possible
(short of themadman's compulsive decision to break free) is fast
approaching. The world we have made is closing in upon us, the
pressures are mounting, and techniques whereby men can be
reduced to a condition only fractionally different to that of auto-
mata are improved year by year. The 'developed' world, as it is so
curiously called, with the 'developing' world close on its heels, now
seems to be possessed by an impersonal force quite outside the
reach of our will, a force which means to prevail, regardless of the
transformation this requires in man's nature and in his status.
Development, understood in this sense, obeys its own laws. They
are not ours —or God's.
Yet it is only the little man meshed in this process, frightened

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 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
of shadows, aware of his own weakness and dependence, who can
stand up against the great wind. The big men will not help,
for present circumstances must inevitably bring to power chiefly
those who co-operate wholeheartedly with the course events are
taking and lend themselves as ready instruments to the prevailing
force. It is not in their nature to cry 'Stop ! \
According to certain traditions, the burden of personality,
which is also the burden of viceregal responsibility, was offered
around creation in That Time, the time of the beginnings, and was
—
refused on every side the very mountains are said to have trem-
—
bled and fallen back in fear until, at last, man accepted it. We
are not free to lay the burden aside. Whether we know it or not, we
are accountable for what happens to our province.
And this means that neither a lack of worldly power nor sub-
ordination to many masters in a giant organisation suffice to exempt
us from the necessity for choosing or to save us from the conse-
quences of our choice. The little man in a big world may think
himself weak as a kitten, seeking only to 'get by' and glad that the
necessity for making great decisions devolves, not upon him, but
upon those others, whose orders he so readily obeys. He is de-
ceived. Those others cannot bear his burden for him. He was born
to it, having been born a man, and it is as much a part of him as
his own flesh. Those who think they have some kind of right to a
quiet life have come to the wrong place.
The most menacing among the tendencies now at work in the
world —menacing, that is, to what remains of man's freedom of
movement —depend upon a general conviction that our respon-
on the one hand to the realm of personal rela-
sibility is limited
tionships and, on the other, to doing our duty, understood in the
sense of conscientiousness towards our employers and towards the
organisation in which we work. Behind this there is also a sense of
obligation to keep the wheels turning, and we are subjected daily
to a flood of propaganda aimed at strengthening this sense of
obligation and persuading us to play our part in the 'march of
progress' and to adjust to the 'needs of the modern world'. The
notion that each individual man is accountable, not merely for
what he does 'of his own free will', but also for every action in
which he participates or assists is destructive of these limitations
and calls into question the nature of this obligation. It is totally
incompatible with the mechanism of the modern age and, above all,

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
with the process whereby an age of complete human abdication
already prefigured in the Socialist societies —may be brought into
being.
Accountability does not really diminish in proportion to the
size of the organisation in which a man is enmeshed but the per-
;

sonal sense of accountability withers away. If three or four men

band together in some enterprise, each will have at least a certain
power of decision and a certain sense of responsibility for what is

done. The larger the organisation, the less scope there is for
decision and the easier it becomes to forget that the consequences
of our acts relate to us personally and directly. All that seems to be
required of us is conformity.
And yet the conformist hasmade a choice, even if it was little
more than the choice of abdication, and he is accountable for
what is done with his co-operation. When a number of men unite
to commit a crime which results in killing, all stand equally
accused of murder. They are treated by the Courts, not as though
a single acthad been fragmented and the responsibility for it par-
celled out among them, but as though each, individually, was
the one murderer. There can be no corporate ownership of human
acts and no diminished responsibility when a man is acting in
concert with others. We stand alone, each of us, burdened with all
that we have done and all that has been made possible through our
presence in a particular place at a particular time. This is an aspect
of the grandeur of the human state, and this is what we are fit for
and from this there is no escape.

No escape, that is, at the worldly level and within the purely
existentialframe of reference no escape so long as we think our-
;

selves alone, abandoned and without refuge. If the matter rested

there we would indeed be solitary stars in a firmament of darkness.
But there are other dimensions than these.
'I take refuge', says the Muslims T take refuge with Thee
;

from the evil of my hearing and the evil of my seeing from the ;

evil of my tongue and from the evil of my heart and from the evil
of my sexual life. I take refuge with Thee, O God, from unprofit-
able knowledge and from a heart without reverence, and from an
ever-demanding self, and from unheard petition. I take refuge with
Thee from hunger, the worst of bedfellows, and from treachery
that ruins friendships, and I take refuge with Thee from the evil

200
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
suggestions of the breast and from the frustration of affairs . . .',

which completes the circle

until the final cry Behold, I take :
'

refuge with Thy good pleasure from Thy wrath and with Thy
pardon from Thy punishment and I take refuge with Thee from
;

Thyself.'*
This belongs to the border country, where the human creature
sets footon the bridge provided. Beyond lies a less fearful region,
and the 13th century Muslim saint, the Lady Rabiya, prayed, 'My
Lord, eyes are at rest, the stars are setting, hushed are the move-
ments of birds in their nests, of monsters in the deep. And Thou
art the Just who knows no change, the Equity that swerves not,
the Everlasting that passes not away. The doors of kings are
locked, watched by their bodyguards. But Thy door is open to
him who calls on Thee. My Lord, each lover is now alone with his
beloved. And I am alone with Thee.'f
The is from an imperfect world in which even
taking of refuge
heavenly fruit is worm-eaten and from a selfhood pitted and
riddled with the same imperfection and in this world the man who
;

depends upon his own strength, the self-reliant man, is inevitably

a pathetic figure. There are a thousand ways in which his strength
may be destroyed. It is a question only of the degree of pain, fear
or deprivation required to reduce him to abject weakness. 'There is

no force and no strength save in Allah !

' is among the most com-
mon of Muslim sayings, and to forget it is to put all one's weight
upon a matchwood crutch.
The —
and the source of all strength is at the
place of refuge —
centre,where the grim dichotomies are resolved and man is sup-
plied with all the strength he needs and the 'evil' from which ;

refuge is taken is not an evil inherent in human faculties or in

their objects. It is the quality of obscurity which clings like a cob-
web to these faculties and these objects in so far as they are frag-
mentary and incomplete in themselves unless their connection
with totality is constantly renewed. Only through prayer, under-
stood in its widest sense and ranging from the highest contempla-
tion to the most desperate cry for help, is that connection made
and maintained. Only in prayer is man fully himself.
Since the centre is the place of unity and the source of all such

* Quoted by Constance Padwick in Muslim Devotions (published by

spck).
t ibid.

201
 KING OF THE CASTLE
peace and strength as we can know in our experience here, on the
periphery, it is also the source of love ; love's only source. Already,
in our human experience, the lover's eye participates in the unify-
ing clarity which belongs to all central (as against peripheral)
vision.
The fact that some may think what they saw when their
that
sight was clarified was an mere gloss on the ugly data
illusion, a
of practical experience, alters nothing. For a person or a thing is,
in truth, what God sees not what we see with a cold eye, an
;

avaricious heart and a jaundiced temper. Recounting the tale of

Layla and Majnun, the heroic lovers of Islamic tradition, Rumi
tells how Layla was brought before the Ruler and how he said to

her: 'Art thou she by whom Majnun was distracted and led
astray? Thou art no better than other fair ones'. 'Be silent', she
said, 'for thou art not Majnun !

All that has been said of viceregal power and of that shabby
King of the Castle who tends the crumbling walls while the waves
eat them away and all that has been said about responsibility as a
dimension of our lives which cannot be measured against the
standards which this world provides pre-supposes a doctrine of
man's nature in terms of which his everyday personality is no
more than the tip of an iceberg. It assumes his rootedness in a
central place untouched by the winds and the tides we know and
implies that the castle over which he rules is important only for
the patterns which it briefly embodies in sand.
Meanwhile the supposed masters of this world, the leaders who
have fought their way to the top of the human pile (and must fight
without respite to stay on top), are too enmeshed in the processes
now at work to look up for a moment from their eighteen-hour-day
labours and see where they are going. Responding as best they can
to crisis following upon crisis, and faced with logistic and admini-
strative problems which are becoming increasingly unmanageable,
they cannot afford to cultivate the lover's eye or the vision of the
God-centred man.
They are no less competent than the average man-in-the-street,
whom they officially represent, but the demands made upon their
time and energy would incapacitate better men than these and
effectively prevent them from giving serious thought to any issue.
Yet it is not necessity which makes these demands. They are gal-
vanised into ceaseless activity by a fever for change which is self-

202
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
generating and serves no purpose. More and more laws are made
for the sake of law-making more and more interference in every
;

aspect of human life prevents anything from functioning in

accordance with its own nature ; solid buildings are pulled down
so that shoddy ones may be put up, and everything is out-of-date
by the time it is ready for use.
In the grip of this fever and seized by the momentum of the
world's descending course, they pull their carts as blinkered
horses, seeing nothing but the small stretch of road immediately
ahead. To stop now, even to pause for breath, would bring the
turning wheels to a halt. To attempt to reverse the process or to
check its gathering momentum would be to destroy the modern

world as we know it. So the process continues and its momentum

increases.
Anyone who could fling himself out of the vehicle and, in some
last sanctuary, stand at the still centre of the world might expect
to hear a huge din of overheated metal fading into the distance, in
the direction of nothingness ; a juggernaut with its great load of
human souls.
And still, in the midst of unprecedented change, flurry and
pandemonium, the human situation remains what it always was.
Man is still either Viceroy or usurper, still noble when he achieves
beauty of form both within himself and in his environment, and
still able to look upon Layla with the eyes of Majnun. And Truth

is what it has always been accessible, in varying degrees, to those

:

who focus their attention, their love and their deepest hunger in the
right direction.

To say that it is possible for man to have access to the truth and
so to pass beyond the region of mere opinion is to take great risks.
The tolerance so highly valued in a number of Western countries
rests upon a kind of agreement that no one can really be sure of
anything and that all sincere opinions should therefore be respected.
This, at least, is the theory. In practice there are many opinions
which are firmly censored, and anyone in Britain or the United
States today who expresses views totally at variance with the con-
temporary climate of opinion soon comes up against the limits of
'tolerance'. The fact remains, however, that the ideology of our
time cannot admit that some people may be right in an absolute
sense and others may be totally wrong.

203
 KING OF THE CASTLE
There are good reasons for this. It is no longer commonly
believed that the world, with all its business, rests in the hands
of God. People think that everything depends upon themselves, or
at least upon chosen leaders no better than themselves ;
they see
—
some of the dangers which surround us not least that of physical
—
annihilation in nuclear war and hope that if we all keep very
quiet, do nothing to 'rock the boat', and tolerate evil and error
for the sake of peace (or detente)we may survive. Unfortunately
this is notan attitude shared by enemies of the free society, who
tend to regard peace as a strategem of war and recognise weakness
when they see it.

At the root of the contemporary gospel of tolerance lies a con-

viction that our earthly life is all that matters and that the peaceful
ordering of human society takes precedence over every other con-
sideration. The priests who fixed their gaze beyond the temporal
realm are gone. So are the knights, the warriors, who valued glory
and honour above life itself. Only the bourgeoisie and the pro-
letariat remain, and for them piggery and trough are the sole
reality. In this context a man's worth can be assessed only in terms
of his usefulness to the society in which he happens to find himself,
regardless of whether that society has any intrinsic worth in terms
of our ultimate end, our raison d'etre.
Truth, by its very nature, disturbs the peace when it breaks in
upon the realm of error and relativity, taking possession of human
minds which are by definition partial, limited and easily swayed by
passion. In West Africa the tale is told of a trickster divinity,
Edshu, one of those trouble-makers found in a number of mytho-
logies who set snares for the foolish and, at the same time, en-
lighten the wise. This same Edshu walked one day down the path
between two fields wearing a hat that was red on one side, white on
the other, green in front and black behind (these being, for the
Yoruba people, the colours of the four directions or four compass
points). The farmers watched him pass and, meeting that evening
in the village, discussed the odd-looking stranger they had seen.
'A little fellow in a red hat,' said one. 'Red? Nonsense It was a !

white hat.' Another Green !

And another Black The farmers
' :
1
!
'

came to blows, each knowing himself to be right, and they were

brought before the headman for judgment. Now Edshu revealed
himself, complete with multi-coloured hat ;
deceptive dancer,
trickster, prankster.

204
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
Until 'Edshu' reveals himself, can we blame men for fighting
on behalf of their partial truths? Passionate attachment to a par-
many temperaments there can be no
ticular formulation (and for
faithwithout passion) often involves intolerance towards other,
complementary formulations but to replace this narrow fervour
;

with a tolerance based on agnosticism and indifference to every-

thing that really matters is to substitute a greater evil for a lesser
one.
Good will does not require us to overestimate the intelligence
of ordinary people, whether in the West or elsewhere. Stupidity
exists. Stupid people exist, and it is pointless to pretend (from a
misplaced principle of charity) that they do not or should not exist.
Now it is undeniable that the stupid believer, unless he has a quite
uncommonly gentle disposition, is intolerant by nature. At least
this is preferable to his being a stupid unbeliever. He has got hold
of the right end of the stick, even if he is incapable of understanding
what kind of stick this is. So long as he holds to it he will be drawn
to the right destination.
The man who has grasped one aspect of the truth, seeing —for
example —that 'EdshuV hat is red (or green, as the case may be)
has made effective contact with reality. He may have a long way to
he is not marooned in the desert. If we tell him that
go, but at least
he is indeed right, but only up to a point (certainly the hat is red,
but it is also green) we may leave him so confused that he no
longer knows true from false. A certain narrowness of view can
have a protective function and therefore has a right to exist, but
we pay a price for this in terms of human conflict.
The risk, the potentiality for disorder in the social realm,
which is inseparable from faith in an absolute truth attaches also
to the doctrine of viceregal responsibility. If jobholders and petty
officials are to take it upon themselves to question (whether in-
wardly or actively, according to circumstances) the orders they
receive and the policies they are required to implement, we are
indeed on dangerous ground. How is the machine to function
unless its servants put aside all personal judgment and all sense of
individual responsibility ?
One can only reply that the question is irrelevant. We were
not created to make such a machine work or to behave as automata
in a collectivity. It is essential that first things should be put first.
A civilisation which does not obey this simple and obvious rule

205
 KING OF THE CASTLE
within the limits of the possible — carries within itself the seeds
of its own necessary destruction. There is little point in trying to
preserve the furniture from damage if the result of our efforts is to
bring the house down.
In any case, however much we may hanker after comfort and
security, we have to face the fact that under the peculiar conditions
of this age and, above all, under the conditions likely to be imposed
in our children's time there are many worse things than disorder
and we do well to recall the nature of the obedience that made
possible the existence and smooth-functioning of the Nazi con-
centration camps and the Soviet labour camps. What is most
feared under present conditions is anything that interferes with the
process which is carrying us so swiftly downstream. Organisa-
tional man wants a quiet life, freedom from real responsibility, an
artificial world in which nothing is left to chance and, quite par-

ticularly, the absence of 'difficult' people who create 'complica-

tions'. We are under no obligation to give him what he wants.
What is being attempted in contemporary societies is the achieve-
ment of the kind of order and predictability that is characteristic
of the machine, and this involves closing all the doors and windows
through which a wayward breeze might bring disorder and un-
predictability. Just as the laws with which our societies are en-
cumbered are, in so many cases, designed to prevent a very few
people from gaining an 'unfair' advantage over their fellows, so the
structure of these societies is increasingly determined by the
desire to eliminate risk from human life. It is no coincidence that
a world which goes to such lengths to play safe now faces dangers
greater and more threatening than any known in the past.
We do better to face the natural and, in a sense, providential
hazards inherent in our condition as human beings, rather than
huddle together in a hygienic prison of our own making. There is
no freedom that is not open to abuse, and abuses cannot be
abolished without abolishing the freedom we need to become
what we are. The history of human sanctity, both in the Islamic
world and in Christendom, suggests that civil disorder, social
injustice, the breakdown of amenities or the disintegration of
central authority have not, in the past,
been an obstacle to the
achievement of man's true end. The real threat comes from a
society which attempts to be all-embracing —
in effect, 'totali-
tarian', however democratic its forms —
since such a society

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 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
threatens,by its pseudo-absolute claims, to suffocate those ele-
ments in man which are by their nature fitted to take him on his
'second journey', the only journey that truly matters.
We are, indeed, outwardly and partially social animals and,
through one aspect of our multiform nature, members of a herd ;

but this is not the whole story nor anything like the whole story.
Each of us stands alone before God, as though the earth were a
desert in which no other man or woman was to be found and each ;

of us is alone in death as though there had never been companions,

husbands, wives, children. Alone, too, in pain and in our inmost
and incommunicable thoughts.
'Now have you come unto us, solitary as We created you at the
first, and you have left what We conferred upon you behind your

backs, and We see not with you those your intercessors— of —

whom you claimed that they possessed a share in you. Now is
the bond between you broken, and that which you counted upon
has failed you.'*

When all is said and done, each goes his own way. The parents
who were once all people to him fade into the shadows, young
love becomes a sentimental memory, children grow up and take
their leave, and old friends die. This man plods on, and only one
thing does not change the choice he has, the choice he makes while
:

it is still his to make.

The Hindus speak of 'the human state hard to obtain', and their
doctrine illuminates much that might seem obscure in the Muslim
and Christian teaching that human life presents a stark alter-
native win or lose all. For the Hindus, a being may pass through
:

—
numberless states of existence or, allegorically speaking, number-
less 'births' —before reaching the moment of truth, the human
state, and standing upright before the door which offers an exit
from imprisonment in the chain of 'transmigration'. To arrive at
this door after such long travail and refuse to pass through it is
therefore a kind of suicide. It is as though a man, surfacing briefly
as he is carried along in a rushing stream, were offered the means
of coming to dry land yet missed this opportunity only to be sub-
merged again in the raging waters.
Such doctrine may seem foreign to our thought, but here is a

* Quran, 6 94.
:

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 KING OF THE CASTLE
solid English voice speaking: 'A life devoted to the interests
and enjoyments of this world . . . may be truly called a dream as
having all the shortness, vanity and delusion of a dream only ;

with this great difference that when the dream is over nothing
;

is lost but fictions and fantasies but when the dream of life is;

ended by death, all that eternity is lost for which we were brought
into being.'*
In so many different languages and in terms of different sym-
bolisms it is said that a door onto all that lies beyond our 'bubble'
opens when we are born. At death the door closes, the way is
barred. There are therefore no words to describe the loss suf-
fered by those who slide through their human life, getting by as
best they can and content to do no better than this.
We are fashioned for passing through this door and an awareness
of the reality behind the dream is implanted in our deepest nature,
though for the most part only in embryonic form. A human
environment, a culture or a political system, can only be judged in
terms of whether it develops and nourishes this awareness or kills
it. Children and adolescents, unless warped by an evil heredity or

by quite monstrous circumstances, have a sense of glory which is,

in essence, an inkling of what lies beyond the door, outside our
'bubble'. It is the nature of the modern world first to stultify and
then to destroy this sense of the sublime (a word which is, signifi-
cantly, among the most devalued in our language), doing so in the
name of 'realism' and 'common sense'. Those whose eyes are
thick-horned with cataract assure the sighted —immature and
suggestible as they are —that do with
their vision has nothing to
the real world ; and thismonstrous process makes use both of the
adult's gravity (for he takes life seriously) and his humour (for he
takes it 'with a grain of salt').

Such humour is more than a malign instrument for

often no
pulling down all high and noble through belittlement and
that is

trivialisation, a mockery rooted in fear and expressed as a nervous

snigger in the face of immensity. There is no fun in it and no joy.
But the young are terribly vulnerable to its corroding effects. They
do not know how to cope with a mockery directed against dreams
and feelings and intimations associated with an innocence which
seems to find no echo and no response in the adult world. They

* William Law.

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 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
want, after all, world as soon as pos-
to qualify for entry into that
sible and, for lack of any better model, they must believe that this
poor wisdom — —
narrow, obtuse and short-sighted is the badge of
maturity.
There is, on the other hand, a different kind of humour which
serves a useful, sanitizing function in puncturing worldly preten-
sions and, perhaps, in cutting the adult world down to size. An
an age of sentimental idealism, of self-im-
irreligious age is also
portant people and pretentious trivialities and, having lost so ;

much, the humanist finds it necessary to pretend that men and

women are wiser than they really are, 'nicer' and less selfish than
the facts suggest.
The boyor girl whose inarticulate sense of glory is dismissed
as no more than a symptom of immaturity, is nonetheless en-
couraged to believe palpable untruths about the adult world. The
young are not so easily deceived and, before they consent to join
the charade (persuaded that there is no alternative), they suffer a
disillusionment which, only too often, spreads like a stain until it
encompasses the noble as such, the sublime as such. It is a sad
thing that so many modern Christians —forgetting that Christ
himself said :
4
Why callest thou me good ? none
good save one, is

that is God' —
make a virtue of sentimental falsehoods and there-
fore discredit religion as such in the eyes of the young. A proven
liar is not readily believed when he tells the truth.

The sense of glory is therefore threatened both by a cynicism

which claims to be realistic and by an idealism which refuses to
accept the facts of human nature. Not that it could remain intact
through the passage of the years. At the start it may be no more
than a child's joy in a new present, the excitement of a holiday in a
place full of wonders, or the miracle of first love. All this must
wither away unless transformed into a sense of the sacred, nourish-
and perpetuated through contact with an authentic
ed, stabilised
But if the sense of glory is strangled at birth
religious tradition.
there can be no transformation. A fragile sapling, it requires the
company of great trees if it is to come to maturity. Its truth needs
to be confirmed and reinforced, as it is when the babble of present-
day voices is silenced by the great voices out of our human past
and when certitude, established in authority, stands firm against
all passing opinions. 'The most ignorant of all people,' said a

thirteenth century sufi Master, 'is the one who abandons the

209
 KING OF THE CASTLE
certitude he has for the opinion people have.'* Just so do the
young grow into ignorance.
But the sense of the sacred implies a sense of awe, and one
would have to be either more than human or less than human for
fear not to have some part in this. The child knows fear as he
knows glory. The mature man unites a noble fear for how could —
something so small not fear the Tremendous? with his sense —
of the sacred. 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,
and knowledge of the holy is understanding', said the Psalmist,
underlining the connection between fear and intellectual clarity.
'The fear of God,' says Schuon, 'is no more a matter of sentiment
than is the love of God like love, which is the tendency of
;

our whole being towards transcendent Reality, fear is an attitude

of the intelligence and of the will : it consists in taking account, at
each moment, of a Reality which infinitely surpasses us, against
which we can do nothing, opposing which we could not live, and
from whose teeth we cannot escape. 'f
Only the very simple, who trust as a child trusts (T am too little
to damn myself, said St. Therese of Lisieux) may think of God
entirely without fear. Ultimately, no doubt, love casts out or —
—
absorbs fear, but this in no way alters the fact that fear is the
realistic and rectifying point of departure. Nor is there understand-
ing at any level without knowledge of the holy, at once lovable and
awe-inspiring, since understanding cannot exist in the context
of ignorance of that which is the supreme object of knowledge.

It might be added that the fear of God casts out lesser fears,
whereas love of God enriches and perpetuates lesser loves provided
they are subordinated to it.

If it is stupid not to fear what is to be feared and not to love what

is to be loved, the very root of stupidity is located in the lack of
self-knowledge. Above all, to be quite unaware of our own weak-
ness and of our dependence upon other-than-self is to be incapable
of sound and realistic judgment in any sphere.
Modern man refuses to acknowledge his need for Mercy, his
need for forgiveness and his total dependence upon other-than-
himself. The Edwardian poet who wrote, T am the Master of my
Fate, the Captain of my Soul' was a lonely and neurotic cripple

* Hikam of Ibn 'Ata' illah (E. J. Brill, Leiden).

f Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts: Frithjof Schuon (Faber &
Faber), p. 207.

210
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
who deserves recognition as a great ironist ;
precisely because the
absurdity of this claim stands out so clearly in Henley's case we
can detect the corresponding absurdity in other, less immediately
obvious cases. For all their addiction to psychology, our contem-
poraries dare not see either themselves or others in a clear light,
hence the lethal combination of cynicism and idealism which
tears them apart. They cannot believe in anything and yet they
must believe in something and this is a plain invitation to fantasy
;

and illusion, which come flooding in to fill the space left behind by
departing religious faith.
Even so, there is a corrective always close at hand. Pain, mis-
fortune and bitter loss break in to awaken the man of our time
from the slumberous passage of the days and to bring him face to
face with an aspect of reality. This is always a moment of truth
and therefore a moment of choice. He may, of course, burrow even
deeper into the dream-haunted darkness, like a child diving under
the sheets and making himself very small but it is also possible
;

that he will, in such a moment of truth, emerge from the coverings

which define the kafir's situation and, in the unfamiliar land of
real choice, seek for a direction, a way out, an answer.
Unless he combines folly and arrogance in so potent a combina-
tion that he imagines he can invent his own religion (in which
case he is back under the covers again), he has no alternative but
to turn to traditional religion and re-examine his forgotten heritage.
His education and the conditioning of the period are likely to
make this an act of condescension, in which case he will expect
the full welcome accorded to the prodigal son. He may be disap-
pointed. Moreover he will find no justification, in the religious
doctrines which have come down to us, for picking and choosing
in terms of personal taste and personal prejudices or for sifting
through a religious doctrine in the hope of stealing certain 'nug-
gets of wisdom' which might come in useful. To possess what he
wants to possess he will have to accept a great deal that he never
thought he wanted.
If he is sincere it must be assumed that he has some desire
to escape from the prison in which he finds himself rather than to
prettify his familiar cell with a few embroidered mottos. To come
out from this cell and from the vicious circle in which he finds
himself trapped he will have to leave behind a whole complex
of thoughts and prejudices (reflecting the current climate of

211
 KING OF THE CASTLE
opinion), together with many personal desires and ambitions.
One does not slip out of prison with a cluster of suitcases ; and if
this escape were not, to some extent, a leap in the dark it would
not be an escape.
There can be no new growth unless the ground is cleared. Our
minds and hearts are so clogged with false opinions and false
desires that there is a great deal of clearing to be done. This seem-
ingly negative task is the essential chore upon which all positive
spiritual progress depends. It cannot be undertaken without
divine grace, but no man
can say with certainty where personal
effort ends and the activity of grace begins, and it is not our busi-
ness to be over-concerned with this demarcation. We do what we
can because it is what we can do. The rest is out of our hands.
There remains, however, what is probably the greatest of all
obstacles facing the man whose mind and personality are moulded
by this age : a profound distaste for the paraphernalia of organised
religion and for its readiness to temporise with the forces of this
world.
So far as the institutional side of religion is concerned, this is the
necessary basis for its existence through the ages. An abstract and
disembodied spirituality disappears like a whiff of smoke when
the wind blows hard upon it, and institutions have a protective
function which is, in practical terms, indispensable (whether
we like it or not). One of the first things a man must know about
himself is the fragility of his existence, which can be ended by a
pin-prick, an air bubble in the blood or a moment's inadvertence
and the institutions which embody traditional values are scarcely
less vulnerable. People think it easy to survive in this world
—
easy for the human soul, easy for the Word of God and seem not to
realise how much depends upon the survival of certain repositories
of truth and of divine grace (crystallised, as it were, in religious
forms) in an environment entirely hostile to the other-worldly.
To withstand the destructive tide of time it is necessary to
exercise certain practical skills, not least in the political realm, and
compromise is both necessary and legitimate, always provided
it does not extend to falsifying doctrine or tolerating systems and

ideologies which kill the spirit. We do not live in a bland or sunny

place, but in the midst of turbulent seas and clashing rocks. There
have been periods of history when this fact might be overlooked.
It can scarcely be ignored today.

212
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
Before, for example, condemning the historical manoeuvres of
the Catholic Church or the 'political' Popes we do well to remem-
ber that, had there been no such strategems, there might by now be
nothing left and little or no hope for men and women born into the
Western world at this late stage. At the same time, there is always
the danger that the Church, finding itself a prisoner of the un-
believer's world, may behave like those inmates of the concentra-
tion camps who came to accept their guards' scale of values and to
cooperate willingly with the system. Here everything is a matter of
judgment and tactics, governed by an implacable integrity.
The fact remains that there are many people born in our time
who have no clear and immediate access to an authentic religious
tradition. It may still be natural for the man born into the sector
of the world shaped by almost two thousand years of Christianity
to seek a traditional framework and spiritual home in Catholicism
or in the Eastern Orthodox Church but under present conditions,
;

when competent spiritual directors are hard to find outside the

monasteries and when the acid of modernism has bitten so deeply
into the structure of the Churches, he may be frustrated in his
search. Providence, however, has provided compensations for the
decline of spirituality in our time ; the destruction of the barriers
which formerly separated one traditional 'world' from another
has made it possible for us to look further afield if we must.
Those who do so run very real risks, like tourists wandering
innocently in an unfamiliar land. They may expect to meet 'gurus'
who claim to offer easy access to the peaks of Hinduism quite out-
side the enduring body of the Hindu tradition, neo-Buddhists who
have little acquaintance with the orthodox schools of Buddhism,
'sufis' who have turned their backs on Islamic orthodoxy, and even
certain 'geniuses' who have borrowed bits and pieces from every
religion under the sun (adding a little magic for good measure)
and offer some brand new religion to the brand new people of this
age. One way or another, these false prophets make their appeal to
pride and ignorance, inflating the ego with a poisonous wind. One
need only place such 'masters' and their adepts beside an old
peasant telling his beads to make a very fair guess as to which is the
more likely to be pleasing to God.
Even so there are certain people who find themselves com-
pelled, under the quite abnormal circumstances of our time, to
turn away from the Christian heritage and to seek their home in

213
 KING OF THE CASTLE
Islam, Buddhism or elsewhere. Only in appearance is this a choice
made by the individual in truth the choice is made for him, the
;

way indicated by unmistakeable signs and the matter concluded

without too much But no one should assume, from the doc-
fuss.
trine of the transcendent unity of the religions, that there areno
real differences between them. If this were so, they would have no
raison d'etre. Each represents a unique Revelation and a unique
perspective, and each creates around it a unique psychological and
emotional climate, moulding the most intimate contours of the
human personality.
Unity between the religions lies at the centre or, in effect, at the
journey's end. Here and now diversity predominates and, as we
have already seen, one perspective necessarily excludes all others
on the purely human level a man cannot be in two places at once.
;

It is no more possible to mix the religions together and produce

some kind of Highest Common Denominator than it is to express
oneself eloquently in a mixture of Arabic, Sanskrit and Latin. No
one denies that the same truths may be expressed in any one of
these different languages, but no one imagines that the vocabu-
laries are the same.
From own religion, however, anyone
the firm standpoint of his
can look around and find both confirmation of his faith and illumi-
nation of his doctrine in other shapes of wisdom as he does in the
divine messages imprinted upon the phenomena of nature and of
destiny. wisdom', say the Muslims, 'is the believer's lost
'All
camel'. Whatever our path —
provided it is authentic and founded
—
upon Revelation we have an owner's rights over every riding beast
and every milk-giver that comes our way. Adhere to one synthesis
of the human heritage, and you have access to the whole of that
heritage and may seek knowledge in every corner of the globe.
Just as surely as they seek the treasures of this world, men seek
the truth, though often enough they fall asleep on the way or
are diverted by counterfeits and forget where they were going. It
is as much our nature to look upwards as it is the cow's nature to

look down at the grass she is cropping. But to follow our nature in
this respect means to conform ourselves to the human Norm
and, in an entirely abnormal age, this is hard, uphill work. Spiritual
not theory, although it is the more firmly established when
life is

backed by theory it is not sentimentality, although it requires the

;

support of sentiment, nor idealism, although it makes use of our

214
 WHAT WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE
capacity for idealism. Spiritual life is primarily an effort to drag
our attention away from the pandemonium and uproar which
rivet it and to turn towards the 'open', towards the splendour of the
Real. It is also a work of transformation —alchemist's work—since
our leaden nature is to be turned into gold, a metal fit for heaven.
Every day is a good day to begin this work, but every day
—
provides its crop of reasons for delay and hesitation we are busy,
—
we have problems and time passes. We behave, many of us, like
senile old people who, when the house is on fire, mumble over
small possessions, fuss and natter, while their end roars all about
their ears.
It is said in Islam that when a man takes one step towards God,
then God himself comes down from the Throne of Power and
Dominion and takes ten steps towards this man. The taking of
that first step however requires both a child's spontaneity and a
grown man's decisiveness one must indeed 'become as a little
;

child', undoing all the false maturity which was so ill done and
learning to walk again. The man who is truly seized by the sense
of the sacred and by the 'divine attraction', as iron shavings are
drawn to a magnet, is concerned with the object of his love, the
infinitely desirable Beauty which he recognises again and again
in all contingent and delegated loveliness. We have been given eyes,
and we must look ears, and we must listen. There is much to be
;

seen and heard if we are attentive and not entirely absorbed in the
buzzing of our own thoughts and the itch of our own needs. But,
above all, we have been given the power of movement 'Had We
—
willed it so, We would indeed have fixed them in their place,
unable to go forward .,'
. says the Quran
. —
and the power of
decision. Having taken a first step, it is by placing one foot in front
of the other that we advance and it is by travelling that we arrive.
;

Seen from here it may look like a hard journey and a lonely one ;

yet none can number the multitude who have gone before us on
this way and reached the other shore, and we are told in so many
traditions —
in religious doctrine, in universal myths and under the
subtle disguise of 'fairy tales' —
that the traveller, far from being
alone, is surrounded by helpers and that the very forces which
once seemed most hostile now come to his aid. So it is often said
that he does not, in truth, leave the world behind him, but draws
it after him into the pattern of unity and reconciliation for which

it craved. The self-enclosed man is friendless in a necessarily hostile

215
 KING OF THE CASTLE
environment, whereas the traveller, like those ancient heroes who
were aided in their moments of greatest peril by birds and beasts
and plants, is nowhere rejected and everywhere at home.
'
Just as it is the nature of fire to burn,' says a contemporary
—
Buddhist writer, 'it is the nature of man would he but remember
—
it to become Awake.' We sleep, troubled by a multiplicity of
dreams, but the traveller walks towards an awakening in which are
known, at last, and fully enjoyed the realities foreshadowed in his
dreaming until his night is done and an unimaginable daylight
;

encompasses him.
It is from a man's choice between sleeping and waking or be-
tween drifting with the tide and making his way upstream that the
is built up. Here we stand, as creatures made
pattern of his destiny
for choosingand we do not know, until the veils are lifted, how
;

much depended upon our choice.

 SUGGESTIONS
FOR FURTHER READING
A significant feature of the current climate of opinion is the
manner in which books that go against the trend of the times are
buried under the weight of ephemeral material issuing from the
world's printing presses. They seldom receive the publicity which
might bring them to the attention of their potential audience.
Some years ago,when Rene Guenon's major works were first
translated and published in the English-speaking world, many of
us who had read him in the original French waited anxiously for
the Press reaction to this momentous event, aware that he might
arouse fury in some quarters but hoping for a positive response
in a few journals and newspapers. What we could not have foreseen
was that he would be completely ignored. Guenon's considerable
influence in spite of this conspiracy of silence gives a hint of the
impact he might have had if his work had been brought to the
attention of a wider public.
Frithjof Schuon's books, although more widely read, have been
generally ignored by the media. Since there is no more challenging
nor more significant voice to be heard in the present age, this sug-
gests that thousands of potential readers are deprived of access to
a body of work which might satisfy their most urgent spiritual
and intellectual needs.
I propose therefore to draw attention to a few authors whose
books may be of interest to any reader who finds that the principles
and point of view put forward in King of the Castle strike a chord
of reminiscence, sympathy or assent.
At present (1977) only two of Guenon's books are readily
available, but these are among the most important of his works
Crisis of the Modern World (Luzac), written fifty years ago but still
timely, and The Reign of Quantity (Penguin Books, USA).
Ananda Coomaraswamy's collected papers and essays are to be
reissued in a collected edition by Pantheon (USA), but any book
of his that can be found in libraries or elsewhere is a treasure worth
the seeking.

217
 KING OF THE CASTLE
Frithjof Schuon's work is easier of access. The Transcendent
Unity of Religions (Harper & Row, USA), Stations of Wisdom
(Perennial Books), Light on the Ancient Worlds (Perennial Books)
and Logic and Transcendence (Harper Torchbooks, USA) are at
present in print, as are at least two of his major works on Islam.
Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts is to be reissued by Peren-
nial Books.
Titus Burckhardt has written a number of outstanding works on
sacred art including, in particular, Sacred Art in East and West
(Perennial Books). Martin Lings, best known for his book on the
Shaikh al-'Alawi, A Moslem Saint of the Twentieth Century (Allen
& Unwin), is the author of Ancient Beliefs and Modern Supersti-
tions (to be reprinted in 1978 by Allen & Unwin). Also deserving of
special mention is The Encounter of Man and Nature (Allen &
Unwin) by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, whose numerous books on Islam
are justly recognised throughout the Muslim world and elsewhere
as among the most profound and illuminating studies to have
appeared in recent years. The Way and the Mountain (Peter Owen
Ltd.) by Marco Pallis, Lord Northbourne's Looking Back on Pro-
gress (Perennial Books), and the recently published Forgotten Truth
(Harper & Row, USA) by Professor Huston Smith of Syracuse
University complete the list.
For those however who question the unanimity of traditional
wisdom there can be no better corrective than Whitall N. Perry's
monumental Treasury of Traditional Wisdom (Allen & Unwin), the
most comprehensive anthology of its kind ever compiled.
Most of these authors contribute from time to time to a quarterly
magazine, Studies in Comparative Religion (published by Perennial
Books Ltd., Pates Manor, Bedfont, Middlesex). A selection of
articles from this quarterly has been published by Penguin Books
(USA) under the title The Sword of Gnosis (edited by Jacob Needle-
man) this includes a series of articles by Titus Burckhardt on
;

'Cosmology and Modern Science' which is of outstanding impor-

tance. Their work also appears in the bi-annual journal, Sophia
Perennis (Editor, Peter L. Wilson) published in Tehran by the
Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy (Director, Seyyed Hos-
sein Nasr) and distributed outside Iran by Kraus-Thomson Ltd.
(FL-9491, Nendeln, Liechtenstein); the French originals of
Frithjof Schuon's articles are published in this journal.

218
 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
These books and articles present variety in unity, very dif-
ferent voices speaking from a single standpoint. Few readers
respond to them in a neutral or tepid fashion. For some they
open up new horizons, often with a sense of shock, discovery and
delight, while others, who cannot bear to have their ingrained
habits of thought and all the cherished assumptions of the age so
ruthlessly challenged, are angered and outraged. They provoke,
in other words, a polarisation of perspectives which serves to
clarify thought and to define the demarcation line between the
basic tendencies of our time, the traditional and the modernist
and justice requires that people today should be offered a clearer
view of the alternatives before them than is commonly available
before they choose their way and fix, once and for all, the orienta-
tion of their lives.