The Materialism of the Masses
In the course of my frequent peregrinations, when I go up and down the country preaching my lay sermons in the towns and cities of Spain, I have a way of taking my audiences as raw material for experiment. I carry out tests upon them, observing how they respond and react to my words. And I have observed that whenever they hear me say something which they think, however erroneously, implies a kind of negation of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of another life transcending this world, they break out into applause. And this applause saddens me and sometimes prompts me to attack.
If these outbursts of applause meant simply: “Hear, hear! Bravo! This man’s honest. He puts love of truth, however painful the truth may be, before love of consolation”—if the applause meant that, I would accept it, though with a certain sadness. But no, this applause means something different. It means: “Hear, hear! Excellent! We don’t want another life! This life is enough for us!” And this wounds me, for it is an explosion of the most debasing materialism.
Not believing that God exists or that the soul is immortal, or believing that God does not exist and that the soul is not immortal—and believing that the soul is not immortal is not the same as not believing that it is immortal—this is a belief that I can respect; but not wishing that God should exist or that the soul should be immortal is a thing profoundly repellent to me.
And it is precisely because I have this thorn in my heart of hearts, because I cannot resign myself to one day returning to unconsciousness, because I have a thirst for eternity, that this applause bruises my heart. That a man should not believe in another life, that I understand, for I myself find no proof of it; but that he should resign himself to this, and above all that he should not desire anything more than this life, that is a thing I do indeed not understand.
And then these gross calumniations of Christ and of Christianity, these stupidities that go contrary to nature and that have stunted the human spirit, and all this alluvion of vulgarity that so many unfortunate people swallow whole....
In one of those series of popular publications which flatter and seduce the coarsest instincts of the unlettered multitudes, there is a book—translated from the Italian, I believe—entitled “Jesus Christ Has Never Existed.” It is one of the most deplorable, shallow, and worthless books imaginable, inspired not by a love of truth but by the most blatant sectarianism. I was talking about it one day to a man who had read it and who had been delighted with it, and I said: “It is not the thesis that shocks me. The thesis that Jesus had no historical existence, that He is a myth, has many times been put forward, and with apparently very plausible arguments, at any rate with erudition—recently by Karthoff—but it is a thesis that has been demolished by the most judicious investigators, no matter what their personal creed may have been.” He replied: “Then I’m sorry, for He ought not to have existed.” And naturally I did not know what to say to that.
This lack of ideality, this aridity and poverty of inward life, which is implied by not longing for another and transcendental life, all this practical materialism, is dismaying to the mind of whosoever meditates a little upon the worth of human life. For my own part, I have very little hope of peoples who fall into this materialistic attitude.
Understand me clearly: I am not assuring you, nor can I assure you, that there is another life; I myself am not convinced that there is; but I cannot conceive that a man, a true man, should not merely resign himself to the enjoyment of this life only, but that he should renounce and even spurn another life. And as for this idea that we shall continue to live in our works, in our children, in the memory of other generations, and that everything renews and transforms itself, and that we shall help to build up a more perfect society—all this appears to me to be the most miserable subterfuge for escaping the depths of despair.
This is the reason why the radicalism of certain sections of the masses dismays me and why I cannot hope that anything fruitful will come of it. The radicalism of the masses in Spain, and perhaps in other so-called Latin, or, more strictly speaking, Catholic, countries, is lacking in the spirit and substance of religion. The weak point in our socialism is its confused notion of the supreme end of the individual life.
Let us better the economic condition of man—good! Let us put an end to the division between rich and poor—exactly! Let us realize a state in which a moderate amount of work will be sufficient to satisfy all our wants—very good! And then? We have now created a society such as Bebel or Kropotkin dreamed of, and what is to happen to each one of us in this society? What is to be the end of this society? What shall we live for?
“Get rich!” said Guizon, the Calvinist, to the Catholic bourgeoisie of France; “get rich!” Very good. And then, when we have got rich?...
A country in which the people think only of getting rich is a country... well, I would rather not inquire what kind of a country it is. Suffice it to say that I at any rate should die in it of cold, of shame, of disgust.
And if a country which is solely preoccupied with getting rich is abhorrent to me, still more abhorrent is the country in which the dominant preoccupation is that of enjoyment, of diversion. In other words, of self-stupefaction.
A collective patriotic enthusiasm, an imperialistic instinct, a passionate desire to influence other peoples and to impress your own stamp upon them—this, after all, is something. But this enthusiasm, this instinct, this desire, lives and burns in those peoples which preserve the inward spring of religion, an underlying inextinguishable thirst for eternity.
The people that is satisfied with this life lives, strictly speaking, on the defensive, and the people that lives on the defensive ends by being absorbed and dominated by those in whom the aggressive and dominating instinct is uppermost. The so-called struggle for life is efficacious only when the struggle is for predominance, not for preservation. The essence of being, as Spinoza showed, consists not so much in the effort to persist in mere being as in the effort to become more, to become everything. It is the appetite for infinity and eternity.
I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples that have been materialized by a long indoctrination of implicit Catholic faith, whose beliefs are a matter of routine, in whom the inner spring appears to be exhausted—that inward disquietude which distinguishes the essentially Protestant spirit. I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples in whom centuries of a religion more social than individual, characterized rather by ritual and ceremony and externality and authority than by inward struggle, have resulted in generating a kind of free-thinking that issues in indifference and in resignation to the life of this world.
From the superstition of a ridiculous and childish heaven and hell they have fallen into the superstition of a gross and unspiritual earth.