Nationalism and Culture (15 page)

^ Lao-tse, The Course and the Ri^ht Way. Translated from the German of Alexander Ular. Published by the Inselhucherei, Leipzig.

^ Friedrich Nietzsche, Gotzen-Ddnimerung {'■''The Ttvilight of the Idols^^).

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84 NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

Wherever a people still exists, it does not understand the state but hates it like the evil eye and a sin against laws and customs. This sign I give you: Every people speaks its own language of good and evil, which its neighbor does not understand. It invented its own language for laws and customs. But the state lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies. And whatever it has, it has stolen. Everything about it is false. It bites with false teeth, rabidly. Even its guts are false.

Power always acts destructively, for its possessors are ever striving to lace all phenomena of social life into a corset of their laws to give them a definite shape. Its mental expression is dead dogma; its physical manifestation of life, brute force. This lack of intelligence in its endeavors leaves its imprint likewise on the persons of its representatives, gradually making them mentally inferior and brutal, even though they were originally excellently endowed. Noth ing dulls the mind and the soul of m an as does the^eternaljn Qnotony oF i^utin gi^and power is essentially routine. Since Hobbes gave to the world his work about the citizen, De Cive, the ideas expressed there have never quite lost vogue. They have in the course of three centuries in one form or another constantly occupied the minds of men, and today dominate their thoughts more than ever. But although Hobbes, the materialist, did not base his ideas on the dogmas of the church, this did not prevent him from appropriating as his own the fateful dictum: "Manjs_fundainentally wicked." All his philosophical contemplations are based^n this assumption. For him, man was just a born beast guided by selfish instincts, without any consideration for his fellows. The state alone put an end to this condition of "war of all against all" and became a terrestrial Providence whose ordering and punishing hand prevented man from sinking hopelessly into the slough of bestiality. Thus, according to Hobbes, the state became the real creator of culture, forcing man with iron compulsion to rise to a higher level of being, no matter how repugnant this might be to his inner nature. Since then this fable of the cultural creative role of the state has been endlessly repeated, and allegedly confirmed by new facts.

And yet this untenable concept contradicts all historical experience. It is exactly by the state that the remnants of beastiality, man's heritage from ancient ancestors, have been carefully guarded through the centuries and cleverly cultivated. The World War with its abominable methods of mass murder, the conditions in Mussojini's Italy, in Hitler's Third Reich, should convince even the blindest what this so-called "culture state" really is.

All higher understanding, every new phase of intellectual development, every epoch-making thought, giving men new vistas for their cultural activities, has been able to prevail only through constant struggle with

the authority of church and state after their supporters had for whole epochs made enormous sacrifices in property, liberty and life for their convictions. When such renewals of spiritual life were finally recognized by church and state, it was always because they had in time become irresistible, and those in authority could not help themselves. But even this recognition, gained only after violent resistance, led in most cases to a planned dogmatizing of the new ideas, which under the spirit-killing guardianship of power gradually became as utterly benumbed as all previous attempts at the construction of a new intellectual outlook.

The very fact that every system of rulership is founded on the will of a privileged minority which has subjugated the common people by cunning or brute force, while each particular phase of culture expresses merely the anonymous force of the community, is indicative of the inner antagonism between them. Power always reverts to individuals or small groups^ of_individuals^ cult ure has its roots in ^he _community. Power is always the sterile element in society, denied^ all creative^force. Culture embodies procreative will, creative urge, formative impulse, all yearning for expression. Power is comparable to hunger, the satisfaction of which keeps the individual alive up to a certain age limit. Culture, in the highest sense, is like the procreative urge, which keeps the species alive. The individual dies, but never society. States perish, cultures only change their scene of action and forms of expression.

The state welcomes only those forms of cultural activity which help it to maintain its power. It persecutes with implacable hatred any activity which oversteps the limits set by it and calls its existence into question. It is, therefore, as senseless as it is mendacious to speak of a "state culture" j "for it is precisely the state which lives in constant warfare with all higher forms of intellectual culture and always tries to avoid the creative will of culture.

But although power and culture are opposite poles in history, they nevertheless have a common field of activity in the social collaboration of men, and must necessarily find a modus vivendi. The more completely man's cultural activity comes under the control of power, the more clearly we recognize the fixation of its forms, the crippling of its creative imaginative vigor and the gradual atrophy of its productive will. On the other hand, the more vigorously social culture breaks through the limitations set by political power, the less is it hindered in its natural development by religious and political pressure. In this event it grows into an immediate danger to the permanence of power in general.

The cultural forces of society involuntarily rebel against the coercion of institutions of political power on whose sharp corners they bark their shins. Consciously or unconsciously they try to break the rigid forms which obstruct their natural development, constantly erecting new bars

before it. The possessors of power, however, must always be on the watch, lest the intellectual culture of the times stray into forbidden paths, and so perhaps disturb or even totally inhibit their political activities. From this continued struggle of two antagonistic aims, the one always representing the caste interests of the privileged minority, the other the interests of the community, a certain legal relationship gradually arises, on the basis of which the limits of influence between state and society, politics and economics—in short, between power and culture—are periodically readjusted and confirmed by constitutions.

What we mean today by "law" and "constitution" is merely the intellectual precipitate of this endless struggle, and inclines in its practical effects more to one side or the other according as power or culture achieves a temporary preponderance in the life of the community. Since a state without society, politics without economics, power without culture, could not exist for a moment and, on the other hand, culture has thus far not been able to eliminate the power principle from the communal social life of men, law becomes the buffer between the two, weakens the shock and guards society against a continuous state of catastrophe.

In law it is primarily necessary to distinguish two forms: "natural law" and so-called "positive law." A natural Jaw exists where society has not yet been politically organized—before the state with its caste and class system has made its appearance. In this instance, law is the result of mutual agreements between men confronting one another as free and equal, motivated by the same interests and enjoying equal dignity as human beings. Positive law first develops within the political framework of the state and concerns men who are separated from one another by reason of different economic interests and who, on the basis of social inequality, belong to various castes and classes.

^Positive law becomes effective on the one hand by giving the state (which everywhere in history has its roots in brute force, conquest and enslavement of the conquered) a legal character j on the other hand, by trying to achieve an adjustment between the rights, duties and privileges of the various classes of society. However, this adjustment has permanence only as long as the mass of the conquered submits to the existing condition of the law or does not feel itself strong enough to fight against it. It changes when the demand of the people for a reformation of the laws becomes so urgent and irresistible that the ruling power—obeying necessity and not an inner impulse—has to take account of this desire if they do not wish to run the risk of being completely overthrown by a violent revolution. When this happens, the new government formulates new laws, which will be the more liberal the more vigorously the revolutionary will lives and finds expression among the people.

In the despotic realms of ancient Asia, where all power was embodied

In the person of the ruler, whose decisions were uninfluenced by the protest of the community, power was law in the fullest meaning of the word. Since the ruler was revered as the immediate descendant of the godhead, his will prevailed as the highest law of the land, brooking no other pretensions. So, for instance, the famous code of Hammurabi was based wholly on "divine law" revealed to men by sacred command, and in consequence of its origin not subject to human judgment.

However, the legal concepts expressed in the codes of an autocrat are not merely the will of a despot. They are always bound up with ancient morals and traditional customs which have in the course of centuries become habitual in men and are the result of their communal social life. The Code of Hammurabi i s no exception to this rule, for all the practical precepts of Babylonian law, springing from the needs of social life, already had validity among the people long before Hammurabi put an end to the rule of the Elamites, and by the conquest of Larsa and Jamutbal laid the foundation of a unified monarchy.

Right here appears the dual character of the law, which cannot be denied even under the most favorable circumstances. On the one hand, law gives ancient custom, which has taken root from antiquity among the people as the so-called "common law," a definite content. On the other hand, it provides for the prerogatives of privileged castes a lawful aspect, which conceals their unholy origin. Only by a careful scrutiny of this patent mystification can we understand the profound belief of men in the sacredness of law: it flatters their sense of justice and at the same time establishes their dependence on a higher power.

This inner discrepancy becomes most clearly apparent when the phase of absolute despotism has been overcome and the community participates more or less in the making of the law. All the great contests in the body politic have been contests about law, for men have always tried to confirm their newly gained rights and liberties by the laws of the state j which naturally led to new difficulties and disappointments. This is the reason why thus far every struggle for right has changed to a struggle for power, why the revolutionary of yesterday has become the reactionary of today; for it is not the form of power but power itself which is the root of the evil. Every power, of whatever kind, has the impulse to reduce the rights of the community to a minimum to make secure its own existence. Society, on the other hand, strives for a constant extension of its rights and liberties, which it seeks to achieve by the limitation of the functions of the state. This is especially apparent in revolutionary periods when men are filled with the longing for new forms of social culture.

The contest between state and society, power and culture, is thus comparable to the motion of a pendulum which proceeds always from one of its two poles—authority—slowly struggling toward the opposite

pole—freedom. And just as there was once a time when might and right were one, so we are now apparently moving toward a time when every form of rulership shall vanish, law yield place to justice, liberties to freedom.

Every reconstruction of the law by the incorporation of new rights and liberties or the extension of those already existing emanates from the people, never from the state. The liberties we enjoy today, in a more or less limited degree, the people owe neither to the good will nor the special favor of government. On the contrary, the possessors of public power have left no means untried either to prevent the establishment of new rights or to render them ineffective. Great mass movements, indeed actual revolutions, were necessary to win from the possessors of power every little concession} they would never have yielded one of them voluntarily.

It is, therefore, a complete misconception of historical facts that leads a highflown radicalism to declare that political rights and liberties as laid down in the constitutions of the various states are without significance because they have been formulated and confirmed by government. It is not because the possessors of power viewed these rights sympathetically that they established them, but because they were compelled by outward pressure. The spiritual culture of the time somewherp burst the bounds of the political frame, and the ruling powers had to submit to forces which for the time being they could not neglect.

Political rights and liberties were never won in legislative bodies, but compelled from them by external pressure. Moreover, even legal guarantee by no means gives security that such rights will be permanent. Governments are ever ready to curtail existing rights or to abolish them entirely if they believe the country will not resist. It is true that attempts at curtailment have sometimes resulted disastrously for possessors of power who did not rightly estimate the strength of their opponents and did not know how to choose the proper time for action. Charles I had to pay for his attempt with his lifej others, with the loss of their power. But this did not prevent constant new attempts from being made in this direction. Even in those countries where certain rights like freedom of the press, of assembly, of organization, and so on, have for centuries been established among the people, the governments seize every favorable opportunity to curtail these rights, or by judicial hair-splitting to give them a narrower interpretation. America and England furnish us in this respect with many examples that constitute food for reflection. Of the famous Weimar constitution of the Germans, put out of commission on almost any rainy day, it is hardly worth while to speak.