The Aristos

1 We may reject some of these as we might reject certain houses to live in; we cannot reject them as houses for anyone else to live in, we cannot deny them utility in part, beauty in part, meaningfulness in part; and therefore truth in part.

2 Ernst Mach: A piece of knowledge is never false or true – but only more or less biologically and evolutionally useful. All dogmatic creeds are approximations: these approximations form a humus from which better approximations grow.*

CHRISTIANITY

3 In a hundred years ecclesiastical Christianity will be dead. It is already a badly-flawed utility. The current ecumenical mania, the ‘glorious new brotherhood’ of churches, is a futile scrabbling behind the wainscots of reality.

4 This is not to deny what Christianity has done for humanity. It was instituted by a man of such active philosophical and evolutionary genius that it is little wonder that he was immediately called (as it was a necessary part of his historical efficacy that he should be) divine.

5 Christianity has protected the most precarious, because most evolved, section of the human race from itself. But in order to sell its often sound evolutionary principles it was obliged to ‘lie’; and these ‘lies’ made it temporarily more, but now finally less, effective.

6 In no foreseeable future will many of the general social laws and attitudes stated or implied in Christianity be archaic; this is because they are based on compassion and common sense. But there is in every great religion a process akin to the launching of space vehicles; an element that gives the initial boost, the getting off the ground, and an element that stays aloft. Those who cling to Christian metaphysical dogma are trying to keep launcher and launched together.

7 Furthermore, the essential appeal of a religion will always be racial, and always more accessible to the originating race or racial group than to others. A religion is a specific reaction to an environment, a historical predicament; and therefore always in some sense inadequate to those who live in different environments and predicaments.

8 First the buttress of dogmatic faith strengthens, then it petrifies; just as the heavy armour of some prehistoric reptiles first enabled them to survive and then caused them to disappear. A dogma is a form of reaction to a special situation; it is never an adequate reaction to all situations.

9 The Bet Situation: however much evidence of historical probability the theologians produce for the incredible (in terms of modern scientific credibility) events of the life of Jesus, they can never show that these events took place verifiably in the way they claim they took place. The same is finally true, of course, of any remote historical event. We are always reduced, in the bitter logical end, to the taking of some such decision as the Kierkegaardian step in the dark of the Pascalian pari; and if I refuse to believe these incredible events took place, then it can be said that I am doing no more than taking my own blind step in the opposite direction. A certain kind of blind believer, not confined to Christianity but common in it since the days of Tertullian, uses the apparent absurdity, and the consequent despair, of our never being able to establish any certainty of belief as both a source of energy for the step in the dark and an indication of the direction in which it should be taken. Because (it is said) by any empirical human definition of what constitutes knowing I cannot know anything finally, I must leap to some state that does permit me to know finally – a state of certainty ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ attainment by empirical or rational means. But this is as if, finding myself in doubt and in darkness, I should decide, instead of cautiously feeling my way forward, to leap; not only to leap, to leap desperately; and not only to leap desperately, but into the darkest part of the surrounding darkness. There is an obvious emotional heroic-defiant appeal about this violent plunge from the battlements of reason; and an equally obvious lack of spiritual glamour in the cautious inching forward by the dim light of probability and the intermittent flicker (in this remote region) of scientific method. But I believe, and my reason tells me I am right to believe, that the step in the dark constitutes an existential betrayal and blasphemy, which is the maintaining that scientific probability should play no part in matters of faith. On the contrary I believe that probability must play a major part. I believe in the situation and cosmos described in the first group of notes here because it seems to me the most probable. No one but Jesus has been born of a virgin or has risen on the third day, and these, like the other incredible facts about him, are running at very long odds indeed. It is countless thousands of millions to one that I am right in refusing to believe in certain aspects of the Biblical accounts of his life, and countless thousands of millions to one that you, if you do believe them, are wrong.*

10 To take these incredible aspects from his life does not diminish Jesus; it enhances him. If Christians were to say that these incredible events and the doctrines and rituals evolved from them are to be understood metaphorically, I could become a Christian. I could believe in the Virgin Birth (that the whole of evolution, of whatever is the case, fathers each child); in the Resurrection (for Jesus has risen again in men’s minds); in the Miracles (because we should all like to perform such generous acts); in the Divinity of Christ and in Transubstantiation (we are all complementary one to another, and all to ‘God’); I could believe in all these things that at present excommunicate my reason. But traditional Christians would call this lack of faith.

11 Intelligent Athenians of the fifth century knew their gods were metaphors, personifications of forces and principles. There are many signs that the athenianization of Christianity has begun. The second coming of Christ will be the realization that Jesus of Nazareth was supremely human, not supremely divine; but this will be to relegate him to the ranks of the philosophers and to reduce the vast apparatus of ritual, church and priesthood to an empty shell.

12 It is not what Jesus made of mankind, but what mankind made of him.

13 The Christian churches, contrary to the philosophy of Jesus himself, have frequently made their own self-continuance their chief preoccupation. They have fostered poverty, or indifference to it; they have forced people to look beyond life; they have abused the childish concept of hell and hell-fire; they have supported reactionary temporal powers; they have condemned countless innocent pleasures and bred centuries of bigotry; they have set themselves up as refuges and too often taken good care that outside their doors refuge shall be needed. Things are better now; but we have not forgotten that things were not better till history presented the churches with a clear choice: reform or die.

14 A similar scramble to clean up the house is taking place today in Christian theology; but it comes too late. There are ‘advanced’ Christian thinkers who propose a god not very different from the one I have described earlier. They wish to humanize Jesus, to demythologize the Bible, to turn Christianity into something bizarrely like an early Marxism. Everything we once understood to be Christianity is now, we are told, a metaphor of a deeper truth. But if we can now see this deeper truth, then the metaphor is unnecessary. The new theologians are sawing the branches they sit on; and they are bound to fall.

15 Worst of all, the churches have jealously caged Jesus. What right have they to say that he cannot be approached except through them? Must I believe in the Olympians and practise ancient Greek religious rituals before I can approach Socrates? The church has become not the body and spirit of Jesus; but a screen and barrier round him.

16 Jesus was human. Perhaps he believed he was all that he claimed to be; but that he was not all that he claimed to be is trivial, not vital, because he was human; and because the essence of his teaching does not depend on his divinity.

17 There is no redemption, no remission; a sin has no price. It cannot be bought back till time itself is bought back.

18 Children learn very early the double vision a dogmatic church induces. They pray to God and nothing happens. They learn that there are two modes of behaviour, an absolute one in church, and a relative one outside. They are taught science and then ordered to believe what is palpably unscientific. They are told to revere the Bible, and yet even they can see that it is in one way a rag bag of myths, tribal gibberish, wild vindictiveness, insane puritanism, garbled history, absurdly one-sided propaganda – and in another way a monument of splendid poetry, profound wisdom, crowned by the richly human story of Jesus.

19 It is not the child adopting double standards who is to blame; it is the churches that perpetuate them. To claim of something that it belongs to a special category of absolute truth or reality is to pronounce its death sentence: there is no absolute truth or reality.

20 After Platonism, and surrounded by the puerilities of the debased classical religion of the later Roman civilization, Mediterranean man was bound to develop a monotheistic and ethically-inclined counter-religion. A kind of Jesus and a kind of Christianity was as inevitable as was a kind of Marx and Marxism in the later stages of the Industrial Revolution.

21 Humanity is like a tall building. It needs stage after stage of scaffolding. Religion after religion, philosophy after philosophy; one cannot build the twentieth floor from the scaffolding of the first. The great religions prevent the Many from looking and thinking. The world would not at once be a happier place if they looked and they thought; but this is no defence of dogmatic religions.

22 Does one snatch a cripple’s crutch away because it is not the latest sort? Is it even enough to put the latest sort in his hands? He may not know how to use it. But this is not an argument against the latest sort of crutch.

23 Religious faith: mystery. Rational faith: law. The fundamental nature of reality is mysterious – this is a scientific fact. In basing themselves on mystery, religions are more scientific than rational philosophies. But there are mysteries and mysteries; and Christianity has foolishly tried to particularize the fundamental mystery. The essential and only mystery is the nature of what the Christians call God or Providence. But the church has introduced a fairground of pseudo-mysteries, which have no relation to truth, but only to the truth that mystery has power.

24 Yet man is starved of mystery: so starved that even the most futile enigmas have their power still. If no one will write new detective stories, then people will still read the old ones. Virgin birth makes Jesus unique; the mystery of this impudent uniqueness is so pleasurable that we cannot resist it.

25 In most parts of the world the horse and cart has been superseded by the automobile. But we do not say of the horse and cart that it is untrue, or that simply because the automobile is generally more useful and faster all horses and carts should be abolished. There are still places where the horse and cart is indispensable. Where it is used and useful it is evolutionally true.

26 Militant anti-religious movements are based on this mechanization fallacy: that the most efficient machine must be the best. But it is the most effective machine in the circumstances that is the best.

27 If the necessity of the situation is that it should be softened, misted, muffled, then Christianity is good. There are many such situations. If to a man dying of cancer Christianity makes dying of cancer an easier death, not all the arguments of all the anti-Christians could make me believe Christianity, in this situation, is not true. But this truth is a kind of utility, and in general I think it probable that clear glass is of greater utility than frosted.

28 For every Christian who believes in all the dogma of his church, there are a thousand who half believe because they feel a man should believe in something. If the old religions survive, it is because they are convenient receptacles of the desire to believe; and because they are, though poor ones, ports; and because they at least try to satisfy the hunger for mystery.

29 All the old religions cause a barbarous waste of moral energy; ramshackle water mills on a river that could serve hydro-electric dynamos.

30 All gods alleged to be capable of intervention in our existence are idols; all images of gods are idols; all prayer to them, all adoration of them, is idolatry.

31 Gratitude for having been born and for existing is an archetypal human feeling; so is gratitude for good health, good fortune and happiness. But such gratitude should be ploughed back into the life around one, into one’s manner of being; not thrown vaguely into the sky or poured into that most odious of concealed narcissisms, prayer. Religion stands between people’s gratitude and the practical uses they might put its energy to. One good work is worth more than a million good words; and this would be true even if there were an observing and good-mark-awarding god ‘above’ us.

32 I reject Christianity, along with the other great religions. Most of its mysteries are remote from the true mystery. Though I admire the founder, though I admire many priests and many Christians, I despise the church. It is because men want to be good and do good that it has survived so long; like Communism, it is inherently parasitical on a deeper and more mysterious nobility in man than any existing religion or political creed can satisfy.

LAMAISM

33 Life is pain, suffering, betrayal, catastrophe, and even its pleasures are delusions; the wise man teaches himself to empty his mind of all that is mere triviality, futile flux, and thus learns to live in a state of mystical inward peace. Man is brought into the world in order that he may, by ascesis, train himself to withdraw from it, and thus, it is claimed, transcend it. So the lama refuses to participate in society; it is by extirpating his animal desires and his vain life in society that demonstrates true freedom. He does not resist the nemo; he invites it.

34 Recent world history has driven many in all the continents into this view of life. Few can withdraw totally from their society. But there is a secular lamaism that is widespread. These semi-lamas can be identified as follows: they refuse to commit themselves in any meaningful way on any social or political or metaphysical questions, and not because of genuine scepticism, but because of indifference to society and aU that is connected with it.

35 A semi-lama is one who thinks that to ask nothing of his fellow men permits him to insist that nothing shall be asked of him; as if, in the human context, to contract no debts is to owe nothing. But we aU drift on the same raft. There is only one question. What sort of shipwrecked man shall I be?

36 Freedom of will can be increased only by exercise But the only place where such exercise can be got is in society; and to opt out of that is to opt out of opting. If I jump off a high building I prove I can jump; but I am the one who most needs the proof. The proof is meaningless if I cannot apply it. Why prove Pythagoras to a corpse?

37 The lama allows his desire to be free of society to dupe him into thinking he is indeed free. He no longer sees the prison walls. Nothing will make him believe they exist.

38 There is in oriental lamaism an acute apprehension of the nature of ‘God’. But the mistake is to use this apprehension as a model for humans to copy. Lamaism tells us to make a sustained attempt to achieve oneness with ‘God’, or nothingness. Living, I must learn not to be, or to be as if I was not; individual, I must lose all individuality; I must totally withdraw from all life and yet be in total sympathy with all life. But if we were all lamas it would be as if we were all masturbators: life would end. ‘God’ is in contrast to us; it is our pole. And it is not by imitating it, as the Tao Te Ching recommends, that we honour it; nor does it need honouring.

39 The semi-lama is usually a sensitive person who finds himself frustrated and horrified by the futility and ugliness of life around him. His lamasery is commonly art, which he loves and regards in a characteristically narcissistic and barren way. He enjoys form rather than content; style rather than meaning; vogue rather than social significance; fastidiousness rather than strength. He will often get more pleasure from the minor arts than the major ones, and more pleasure from minor works of art than from major ones. He becomes a connoisseur, a collector, a hypersensitive critic. A taster, a tongue, a palate, or an eye, an ear; and all the rest of his humanity becomes atrophied and drops away.

40 It is true that lamaism, especially in such forms as Zen Buddhism, has a great deal to tell us about the enjoyment of objects as objects; about the beauty of the leaf and the beauty of the leaf in the wind. But this perfecting of the aesthetic sense and this clarifying of the inner metaphor in each, cannot be taken as a way of life. It may be, almost certainly is, a constituent of the good life; but it is not the good life.

41 Lamaism, the withdrawal into self-preoccupation or self-enjoyment, is the perennial philosophy; that is, the philosophy against which all others (like Chris-tianty) are erected. To the extent that we have to nourish self in order to remain healthy psychologically it is as important as the food we eat. But clearly it will flourish most when the self, or individual, feels most defeated and most in danger. The most frequent argument in defence of it then is that someone must guard and preserve the highest standards of living. In the lives of even the most selfish castes and elites there is something good in itself; but this is surely the most relative goodness of all. Early Sevres porcelain is beautiful; but it was not made only of clay, it was made also of the emaciated flesh and bones of every French peasant who starved during the period of its making. All the luxuries we buy ourselves are paid for in the same coin; no economic or cultural plea is sound in the final analysis. Under all its names – hedonism, epicureanism, ‘beat’ philosophy – lamaism is a resource of the defeated. There might be worlds and systems of existence where it was tenable; but not in one like ours, in a permanent state of evolutionary war.

HUMANISM

42 Humanism is a philosophy of the law, of what can be rationally established. It has two great faults. One lies in its inherent contempt for the mysterious, the irrational and the emotional. The other is that humanism is of its nature tolerant: but tolerance is the observer’s virtue, not the governor’s.

43 The characteristic movement of the humanist is to withdraw; to live on the Sabine farm; to write Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo. A humanist is someone who sees good in his enemies and good in their philosophies; he sees good in his enemies because he cannot accept that they are freely evil, and he sees good in their philosophies because no philosophy is without some reason and some humanity. He lives by the golden mean, by reason, by the middle of the road, by seeing both sides; he captures respect, but not the imagination.*

44 It is conventionally held that ancient polytheistic humanism collapsed because it was unrealistic, a highly artificial system. But there is a sense in which it was realistic, as we should expect in any religion springing from Greek origins. The gods on Olympus at least represented actual human attributes, or varying and often conflicting archetypal human tendencies; while the Hebraic system – the uniting of desirable (moralistic) human attributes into one god – was a highly artificial procedure. In many ways the Greek system is the more rational and intelligent; which perhaps explains why it has been the less appealing. The Hebrew god is a creation of man; and the Greek gods are a reflection of him.

45 We often forget to what an extent the Renaissance, and all its achievements, sprang from a reversion to the Greek system. The relationship between paganism and freedom of thought is too well established to need proof; and all monotheistic religions are in a sense puritan in tone – inherently tyrannical and fascistic. The great scientific triumphs of the Greeks, their logic, their democracy, their arts, all were made possible by their loose, fluid concepts of divinity; and the same is true of the most recent hundred years of human history.

46 But the opposition is not, of course, simply between a ‘liberal’ polytheism and an ‘illiberal’ monotheism. Religion has always been for man intensely a field of self-interest; and it is plainly harder to bargain with, or blindly believe in, several gods than one. A certain scepticism and agnosticism, so characteristic of the best Greek thought, is a natural product of polytheism; just as emotional enthusiasm and mystic fervour breed from its opposite. This conflict between scepticism and mysticism long pre-dates the Christian era.

47 Like modern humanists, the ancient Milesians did not believe in an afterlife or in any god. Then, in the seventh and eighth centuries before Christ, came the Orphic revivalist invasion with its Irish stew of redemption, salvation and predestined grace, and all the power of its wild mysteries. By the fifth century the battle between Orphic mysticism and Milesian scepticism was permanent. There has never been peace since between Dionysus and Apollo, and there never will be.*

48 Nonetheless, periods of history come when it seems clear which serves the general need best. Monotheism saw man through the dark ages that followed the collapse of the Roman empire; but today the benevolent scepticism of humanism seems better suited to our situation. What is evident is that it is ridiculous to regard this opposition as a struggle or battle, in which one side must be defeated and the other victorious; instead it should be regarded as the nature of the human polity, the sine qua non of being in society and in evolution.

49 A Christian says: ‘If all were good, all would be happy’. A socialist says: ‘If all were happy, all would be good’. A fascist says: ‘If all obeyed the state, all would be both happy and good’. A lama says: ‘If all were like me, happiness and goodness would not matter’. A humanist says: ‘Happiness and goodness need more analysis’. This last is the least deniable view.

SOCIALISM

50 Napoleon once said: ‘Society cannot exist without inequality of wealth, and inequality of wealth cannot exist without religion’. He was not of course speaking as a theorist of history, but justifying his Concordat with the Vatican; however, this Machiavellian statement suggests admirably both the aims and the difficulties of socialism.

51 Socialism-Communism is an attempt to readjust and to reinterpret Christianity. But among the features of Christianity it sent to the guillotine was the essential one: mystery. Christianity rots because it attempts to preserve a false mystery; socialism will rot because it attempts to abolish a true one.

52 Like Christianity, it has retained the launching mechanism too long after the launching. In order to achieve a greater social justice, the early socialists disseminated various striking but crude theories of equality, of materialism, of history; they idolized the proletariat and blackened all that was not the proletariat. They turned socialism into a bludgeon, a vast explosion. What we need now is not a vast explosion. We need less force, and more thought; less doctrine, and more assessment.

53 For all its hostility to earlier religions, socialism is a religion itself; and this is nowhere more apparent than in its hatred of heresy, of any criticism that does not take certain articles of dogma as incontrovertible statements about reality. Acceptance of dogma becomes a chief proof of one’s faith in the creed. This leads at once to petrifaction.

54 The great problem at the heart of socialism is this: in order to bring social justice to the many, the leaders of socialism were obliged to give them power. But the proletariat are far more skilled at discovering what they want than what they need; so giving them power constituted giving them power to say what they want, not giving them objectivity to see what they need! What the many need above all else is education; they need to be led, not to be leaders. It is this delicate balance that socialist leaders have to keep – on one hand to stay in power they must placate the desires of the many for consumer goods, for the tawdry trivia of life, sufficiently to ensure that they shall not be outbid by the right wing (and even in the most Communist countries there is a right wing), and on the other hand they have to persuade the many that there are nobler things in life than unrestrained free enterprise and the pursuit of cream cake and television circuses. They need the power, the might of the people, and then the consent of the people to the proposition that might is not right; that a universal and ill-educated electorate needs guidance as well as obedience from its elected representatives and governors.

55 Socialism has its afterlife myth, not in a hypothetical other world, but in a hypothetical future of this world. Marxism and Leninism both proclaim, use and abuse the notion of perfectibility; justifying bad means by good ends.

56 Socialism has other myths, such as that of the intrinsic nobility of labour. But it is not the capitalist who ultimately exploits the worker; it is the work itself.

57 The welfare state provides material welfare and psychological illfare. Too much social security and equality breed individual restlessness and frustration: hazard starvation and variety starvation. The nightmare of the welfare state is boredom.

58 Full employment, a planned economy, state ownership of primary industries, national insurance and free medical treatment are admirable things in a society. But such provisions require other provisions. We fortify one flank, and trust the enemy not to attack the other. But evolution knows no chivalry. The higher the standard of living, the greater the need for variety. The greater the leisure, the greater the lack of tension. And the price of salt rises.

59 The welfare state as at present envisaged annihilates factors that evolution values highly: hazard and mystery. This is not an argument against the general principle of the welfare state, but against the inadequacy of present notions of the welfare state, and of what constitutes equality. We need less egalité, and more fraternité.

60 Social stagnation is most likely to occur in extreme societies – extremely just or extremely unjust – and must lead to one of three things: war, decay, or revolution.

61 We need a science that studies the amount of variety, of excitement, of change, of risk of all kinds that the average individual and the average society needs; and why they should need them.

62 Socialism is bedevilled by the spirit of endless and unconsidered yearning towards an impossible equality, conservatism by the pig belief that the fortunate must at all costs ensure their good fortune. Christianity and socialism have both partly failed. In the no-man’s-land between the two stagnant armies there is only one philosophy: the conservative one of self.

63 Yet both Christianity and socialism gain adherents, simply because they are both fighting against a worse creed; and because they appear to be the best public utilizers of right private belief. But they are like armaments manufacturers. Their health is dependent on the continuance of the battle in which they are engaged, and therefore, paradoxically, on the very aims they profess publicly to oppose. Where there is poverty and social injustice, both Christianity and Communism may flourish.

64 Communism and socialism strengthen capitalism and Christianity, and vice versa. Both sides dream of the total extermination of the other; but in the now they need each other, and counter-support each other.

65 In a world in which many societies and racial blocs are on the verge of growing so large that they will have to exterminate one another to survive, and in which the means rapidly to effect such an extermination are at hand, conservatism, the philosophy of unrestricted free enterprise, of self, of preserving the status quo, is obviously the wrong and dangerous one. If conservatism, the right wing, has so much power and influence in the so-called ‘free’ world today it is because autocratic doctrinaire socialism of the Communist kind seems a worse alternative. If humans have to choose between an unfair free society and a fair unfree one, they will always swing to the first alternative, because freedom is man’s magnetic north. There is thus more hope for mankind in parliamentary socialism of the kind evolved in Western Europe than in any other political tendency; and this is in spite of the doctrinaire and other weaknesses I have suggested earlier.

66 Above all, socialism enshrines the vital concept that there is too much inequality in the world; and that this inequality can be remedied. The best socialism wishes to achieve a maximum of freedom with a minimum of social suffering. The intention is right, however wrong the means may sometimes be.

67 The task before parliamentary socialism is that of articulating and advocating its policies to an ill-educated electorate in a society where there is freedom to choose one’s representatives; in short, where there is always the danger that the electorate will choose self rather than society. Where for electoral reasons its policies imitate conservatism, where it insists on measures for doctrinaire reasons, I reject socialism; and where its policies attack the fundamental freedom of choice of the electorate, as in Communism, I reject it. But when it expresses the desire of people freely able to choose other more self-advantageous policies to choose the inauguration of a juster world, I accept it. And how can men of good will support any other political creed?

FASCISM

68 Fascism maintains that it is the duty of the powerful and intelligent to gain control of the state so that the Many may be organized and controlled. At its Platonic best it is the most realistic of political philosophies. But it always breaks on the same rock: the individual.

69 It is the individual in us that makes us suspect measures of which we approve. We can always put ourselves in the place of those who disapprove. Individuality is a channel, a medium through which all individuals can communicate. It is a passport to all other individuals. But it is this essential intercommunicability of individualized intelligences that fascism sets out to destroy. Fascism and imagination are incompatible.

70 Fascists attempt to found a unipolar society. All must face south, none must face north. But in such societies there is a fatal attraction towards the counter-poles of whatever is commanded. If you order man to look to the future, he looks to the present. If you order him to worship God, he worships man. If you order him to serve the state, he serves himself.

71 Society needs some conformities, as a machine needs oil and rounded edges. But many societies demand conformity in precisely the matters where nonconformity is needed, and allow nonconformity where it should be banned. Nothing is more terrible in a society than this wastage or abuse of the desire to conform.

72 The good human society is one in which no one conforms without thinking why he is conforming; in which no one obeys without considering why he is obeying; and in which no one conforms out of fear or laziness. Such a society is not a fascist one.

EXISTENTIALISM

73 All states and societies are incipiently fascist. They strive to be unipolar, to make others conform. The true antidote to fascism is therefore existentialism; not socialism.

74 Existentialism is the revolt of the individual against all those systems of thought, theories of psychology, and social and political pressures that attempt to rob him of his individuality.

75 The best existentialism tries to re-establish in the individual a sense of his own uniqueness, a knowledge of the value of anxiety as an antidote to intellectual complacency (petrifaction), and a realization of the need he has to learn to choose and control his own life. Existentialism is then, among other things, an attempt to combat the ubiquitous and increasingly dangerous sense of the nemo in modern man.

76 Existentialism is inherently hostile to all organization of society and belief that does not permit the individual to choose, so often as he likes, to belong to it. This cussedness, this obstinate individualism, lays it open to misrepresentation by those soi-disant existentialists who are really anarchists or bohemians, and open to attack from those who hold the traditional views of social responsibility and the social contract.

77 There is an invitation in existentialism to reject traditional codes of morality and behaviour, especially when these are imposed by authority or society without any clear justification except that of tradition. There is a constant invitation to examine motives; the first existentialist was Socrates, not Kierkegaard. The Sartrean school invented commitment. But permanent commitment to religious or political dogma (so-called Catholic and Communist existentialism) is fundamentally unexistentialist; an existentialist has by his belief to judge every situation on its merits, to assess his motives anew before every situation, and only then to choose. He never belongs as every organization wants its members to belong.

78 It is to me impossible to reject existentialism though it is possible to reject this or that existentialist action. Existentialism is not a philosophy, but a way of looking at, and utilizing, other philosophies. It is a theory of relativity among theories of absolute truth.

79 To most people it is a pleasure to conform and a pleasure to belong; existentialism is conspicuously unsuited to political or social subversion, since it is incapable of organized dogmatic resistance or formulations of resistance. It is capable only of one man’s resistance; one personal expression of view; such as this book.