THE European world is falling apart because its moral values have gone and there is just nothing to hold it together. Nationalism, racial prejudice, militarism (or simple belief in a social order based on force), commercialism, and the development of the machine are breaking it up before our eyes.
Because of the working of these forces in the absence of faith and of a spiritual concept of man, because the economic man has replaced the spiritual man, everything is cracking. Nothing works; nothing guarantees stability. The League of Nations did not work. Disarmament conferences did not work. The Briand-Kellogg Pact, with the solemn signatures of kings and presidents, did not work. International pledges and treaties do not work. The mania for goods and markets and exploitation of material goes on.
So Europe is upsetting the peace of the five continents. Because of Europe and the European current of ideas and Europe’s example of imperialism and materialism to other continents, women in Singapore have to die, Burmese villagers’ houses have to burn, and peasants in China and in the Caucasus have to watch bombs falling on their fields.
But being itself a slaughterhouse, Europe is now planning to transform Asia and Africa into a gigantic slaughterhouse. It still thinks that the world owes Europe a debt, and that the world has to come up to European standards of living. Europe, I know, still intends to appropriate the world. There are the British Empire, the French Empire, and the Dutch Empire. Even Portugal has got a concession, Macao, in China! Thank God the Spanish Empire has crumbled and collapsed, otherwise we would have just as complicated problems in South America.
Today Asia and Africa must still be the cows that produce the milk for Europeans. Why? Because Europe wants to raise their standards of living and educate them toward self-government! Who in the first place robbed them of their liberty and their self-government? Who says that the standards of living in India have improved, and not deteriorated, after two centuries of English rule? Sir Norman Angell dares not contradict the fact that the abject poverty of the Indian peasants is worse than even that of seventy years ago, owing to English exploitation and the killing of native industries. While I am writing this, the boast of some English bureaucrats in India, “the situation is well in hand,” keeps ringing in my ears. I see the Empire breaking, but unwillingly. But unless the Empire breaks itself, the issue of Empire will break the Allies and the Peace Conference and render futile all that men are dying for now.
But at present, the Europeanization of the world is not just an idea, an abstraction. The democratic leaders of the world are transferring to Asia their sin-smelling and strife-breeding power politics, with the sure result that Asia, by means of a prepared and planned balance of power, will be kept in continual bloodshed and strife and mutual slaughter for the next three centuries, after Europe’s noble example. Europe is the focus of infection on this earth, and its toxin spreads through all the five continents. When will the plague burn itself out? Why cannot Europe leave Asia alone? How can we quarantine Europe? How, in other words, quarantine European power politics? I shall be able to show that without European interference, the problems of the future of Asia after the war are quite simple. With the British, French, and Dutch Empires, the problems of Asia will become as complicated as those of Europe itself after the war.
And here, before I go on, I must make an exception for the lambs of Europe and separate them from the wolves. I mean the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes, the Swiss, who wish nobody any harm and who are pioneers in social legislation and standards of enlightenment. The Dutch, the Belgians, and the English are splendid people when they stay at home. The compelling tradition of social decency is so great that all you need to do to make an Englishman a gentleman again is to ship him back west of the Suez Canal. Really the white man is quite charming when he has got rid of his “burden.” He can even discuss Walter Pater with you.
But what are you going to Europeanize the world with? The better knowledge of vitamins and nutrition, child care, maternity care, and better foundations for women’s dress are conceded. Don’t worry about those. The women of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, China, and the Congo will bless you for these things and gladly pay homage to Europe without question. But what are you going to Europeanize the world with? The European standards of living, of course. Curious that one does not say the standards of morals. Nobody dares to suggest that the standards of morals and of thinking of the East or of the West be raised. No, it is not the gospel of high thinking and simple living that the economic man is the apostle of. Rather the gospel of high living and fairly simple thinking, such simple thinking as that material prosperity brings happiness, or that the industrial man is happier than the craftsman. When one speaks of raising the standards of living, one means clearly and simply that laundry will be more pleasant, and dish-washing and vacuum-cleaning will be easier on the housewife, plus perhaps a quart of milk a day for the Hottentot. One means less hand labor. One means having a car and seeing a movie once a week. One means exactly these things.
The message of raising the standards of living of the world means simply that you want to move the people of the East End and all the world to Park Avenue. But suppose the people of the East End do not like Park Avenue and prefer to remain where they are. Have they lost something important, and what have they lost? Suppose the Hottentot does not care for your quart of milk, and prefers bananas? Suppose the Oriental man does not share your ideas of hand labor and the Oriental woman does not mind washing her clothes on a river bank while chatting with her neighbors, and thinks it pleasanter than washing by a machine in a hot, steaming cellar? Suppose the Oriental man does not think it is such a bad thing to wade knee-deep in rice paddies and plough his land, son in front and father behind? Suppose he believes it is good for the body and the soul to use his hands in work and his bare legs in walking? Suppose a man who lives in a mud hut of bare walls and pushes a hand cart and therefore has a lower “standard of living” is not necessarily living like a pig, as Occidental tourists constantly assume? Suppose he has the culture of a self-respecting man? Suppose he believes in paddling his boat instead of riding a steamboat chugging its way through the water, all the while feeling guilty inside of being corrupted by European standards of ease and idleness? Suppose he prefers his wife to make her own cloth shoes instead of wearing expensive leather shoes that only idle city women can afford? Suppose he believes in mothers nursing their own babies, even in public? Suppose he does not think nursing a baby in public is an indecent, immoral, and lewd spectacle, according to the code of Will Hays, because the true function of the woman’s breasts has not been corrupted in him? Suppose he perceives the subtle physiological truth that the human body is capable of infinite adjustments, that habitual comforts cease to have meaning, and that the hard life is probably healthier than the easy life? Suppose the Seventh Heaven is in a Parisian attic to be ascended by dingy stone stairs? Suppose it is a human truth that a poor newspaper boy is physically, mentally, and morally having a happier childhood than a rich man’s son on Park Avenue learning to skate with James the Butler and Charles the Doorman holding him up by each arm? In other words, suppose material standards of living are not worth raising at all—at the price of increasing class hatred, increasing collectivism, loss of individual freedom, and periodic conscripting of boys of eighteen for war?
At bottom, I believe, the modern European is as superstitious as any Asiatic. The over-all superstition that is an intellectual fad in the present era is belief in determinism, and that man is primarily an animal, governed, shaped and controlled helplessly by material environment. Besides the supreme god of determinism, there are also some fetishes that the modern man worships. I call a superstition any belief in something untrue, and I call a fetish whatever a man worships beyond its proper value. The three European fetishes are, the Potato Fetish, the Population Fetish, and the Power Fetish. For verily these are the gods of the modern era. Man is superstitious anyway; take away his ikon and he must worship something else. Emotionally, he has to be oriented somewhere. He who does not worship something is lost. Even an atheist must worship his mistress’s ankles.
It is these three fetishes that are molding men’s thoughts about the peace, based on the following axioms: (1) Men live by potatoes. Metaphysically, man is a biped searching for potatoes, and human civilization is that aggregate historical force arising out of the biped’s search in the direction of potato supplies. (2) The lack of potatoes is the cause of war, and the possession of potatoes is the guarantee of peace. The more potatoes you have, the more civilized you are, when you can spell out happily the word “Prosperity.” (3) The technique of peace lies in finding and providing the exact ratio between populations and potatoes. (4) Those who don’t have power must grow potatoes, and those who have power may eat, transport, and otherwise dispose of the potatoes that the others grow. (5) As is evident from a natural law, those who have power must see that those who don’t have power grow enough potatoes for the others, or mankind will starve. There must be free access to potatoes, there must be economic planning, and somebody must rule the world. (6) War will not arise between those who have power and those who don’t. The potato or agricultural group is by nature stationary and pacifist; the power or industrial group is by nature aggressive, competitive, and predatory. Consequently, the members of the potato-growing group are very cute and lovable and you may now and then pinch their cheeks, but they need not be taken into consideration. (7) War will arise, however, from the allocation among the power groups of the potato supplies raised by the nonpower groups. (8) Peace, it follows logically, is merely a question of the equitable distribution of potato supplies among the power groups. (9) Inasmuch as the power groups are divided among themselves and by nature suspicious of each other and business is by its nature competitive, aggressive, and predatory, the obvious solution is to keep the power so evenly and delicately balanced that none of them will dare fire the first shot, although it may be conceded that someone may. (10) Since power is dynamic and never static, this balance of power can never be permanently maintained; constant adjustments and new alignments are necessary. (11) The technique of constantly watching out for a rising or new power and making new alignments is called “politics”; the method of switching about alignments and double-crossing former allies, up to the moment the first shot is fired, is called “diplomacy”; the final upset of that delicate and unstable balance is called “war.” (12) This is not very satisfactory, but obviously there is nothing better. (13) A really satisfactory and a most desirable solution would be for one power or combination of powers to acquire sufficient power to dominate the rest in some sort of World Democracy. If the other power groups or potato groups don’t like it, what are they going to do about it? We’ve got better guns and more guns. (14) Damn it, we are honest. We are “realists” who tell no “fairy tales” to deceive the people, while the others who talk about justice and kindness as if they meant it are “visionaries.”
This is the high plane of international thinking about peace problems in the year of our Lord 1943. It is the sum total of our political wisdom. These tenets of thinking, when applied to Europe, have produced European chaos and bloodshed for centuries. The belief is, however, that when they are applied to the world, they will produce World Peace. This is the meaning of the Europeanization of the world.