The following is the speech given by E.M.Forster over radio of British Broadcasting System, July, 1941.
Many of the points he makes are relevant in today's world which is still
sadly full of discrimination and persecution based on religion,
ethnicity, nationality, and social class.
"EVERYBODY today is talking about reconstruction. Our enemies have
their schemes for a new order in Europe, maintained by their secret
police, and we on our side talk of rebuilding London or England, or
western civilisation, and we make plans how this is to be done—five-year
plans, or seven-year, or twenty-year. Which is all very well, but when I
hear such talk, and see the architects sharpening their pencils and the
contractors getting out their estimates, and the statesmen marking out
their spheres of influence, and everyone getting down to the job, as it
is called,a very famous text occurs to me: "Except the Lord build the
house they labour in vain who build it." Beneath the poetic imagery of
these words lies a hard scientific truth, namely, unless you have a
sound attitude of mind, a right psychology, you cannot construct or
reconstruct anything that will endure. The text is true, not only for
religious people, but for workers whatever their outlook, and it is
significant that one of our historians, Dr. Arnold Toynbee, should have
chosen it to preface his great study of the growth and decay of
civilisations.
We shall probably agree on this point; surely the
only sound foundation for a civilisation is a sound state of mind.
Architects, contractors, international commissioners, marketing boards,
broadcasting corporations will never, by themselves, build a new world.
They must be inspired by the proper spirit, and there must be the proper
spirit in the people for whom they are working. For instance, we shall
never have a beautiful new London until people refuse to live in ugly
houses. At present, they don't mind; they demand comfort, but are
indifferent to civic beauty; indeed they have no taste. I live myself in
a hideous block of flats, but I can't say it worries me, and until we
are worried, all schemes for reconstructing London beautifully must
automatically fail.
But about the general future of civilisation
we are all worried. We want to do something about it, and we agree that
the basic problem is psychological, that the Lord must build if the work
is to stand, that there must be a sound state of mind before diplomacy
or economics or trade-conferences can function. What state of mind is
sound? Here we may differ. Most people, when asked what spiritual
quality is needed to rebuild civilization, will reply "Love". Men must
love one another, they say; nations must do likewise, and then the
series of cataclysms which is threatening to destroy us will be checked.
Respectfully
but firmly, I disagree. Love is a great force in private life; it is
indeed the greatest of all things: but love in public affairs simply
does not work. It has been tried again and again: by the Christian
civilisations of the Middle Ages, and also by the French Revolution, a
secular movement which reasserted the Brotherhood of Man. And it has
always failed. The idea that nations should love one another, or that
business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a
man in Portugal, say, should love a man in Peru of whom he has never
heard—it is absurd, it is unreal, worse, it is dangerous. It leads us
into perilous and vague sentimentalism. "Love is what is needed," we
chant, and then sit back and the world goes on as before. The fact is we
can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In
public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilisation, something much less
dramatic and emotional is needed, namely, tolerance. Tolerance is a very
dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press.
It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to
stand things. No one has ever written an ode to tolerance, or raised a
statue to her. Yet this is the quality which will be most needed after
the war. This is the sound state of mind which we are looking for. This
is the only force which will enable different races and classes and
interests to settle down together to the work of reconstruction.
The
world is very full of people—appallingly full; it has never been so
full before—and they are all tumbling over each other. Most of these
people one doesn't know and some of them one doesn't like; doesn't like
the colour of their skins, say, or the shapes of their noses, or the way
they blow them or don't blow them, or the way they talk, or their smell
or their clothes, or their fondness for jazz or their dislike of jazz,
and so on. Well, what is one to do? There are two solutions. One of them
is the Nazi solution. If you don't like people, kill them, banish them,
segregate them, and then strut up and down proclaiming that you are the
salt of the earth. The other way is much less thrilling, but it is on
the whole the way of the democracies, and I prefer it. If you don't like
people, put up with them as well as you can. Don't try to love them;
you can't, you'll only strain yourself. But try to tolerate them. On the
basis of that tolerance a civilised future may be built. Certainly I
can see no other foundation for the post-war world.
For what it
will most need is the negative virtues: not being huffy, touchy,
irritable, revengeful. I have no more faith in positive militant
ideals; they can so seldom be carried out without thousands of human
beings getting maimed or imprisoned. Phrases like "I will purge this
nation," "I will clean up this city," terrify and disgust me. They might
not have mattered so much when the world was emptier: they are
horrifying now, when one nation is mixed up with another, when one city
cannot be organically separated from its neighbours. And, another point:
reconstruction is unlikely to be rapid. I do not believe that we are
psychologically fit for it, plan the architects never so wisely. In the
long run, yes, perhaps: the history of our race justifies that hope. But
civilisation has its mysterious regressions, and it seems to me that we
are fated now to be in one of them, and must recognise this and behave
accordingly. Tolerance, I believe, will be imperative after the
establishment of peace. It's always useful to take a concrete instance:
and I have been asking myself how I should behave if, after peace was
signed, I met Germans who had been fighting against us. I shouldn't try
to love them: I shouldn't feel inclined. They have broken a window in my
little ugly flat for one thing, and they have done other things which I
need not specify. But I shall try to tolerate them, because it is
common-sense, because in the post-war world we shall have to live with
Germans. We can't exterminate them, any more than they have succeeded in
exterminating the Jews. We shall have to put up with them, not for any
lofty reason, but because it is the next thing that will have to be
done.
I don't then regard Tolerance as a great eternally
established divine principle, though I might perhaps quote "In My
Father's House are many mansions" in support of such a view. It is just a
makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It
carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as
we move away from our home and our friends—and stand in a queue for
potatoes. Tolerance is wanted in the queue; otherwise we think, "Why
will people be so slow?"; it is wanted in the tube, "Why will people be
so fat?"; it is wanted at the telephone, or we say "Why are they so
deaf?" or conversely, "Why do they mumble?" It is wanted in the street,
in the office, at the factory, and it is wanted above all between
classes, races, and nations. It's dull. And yet it entails imagination.
For you have all the time to be putting yourself in someone else's
place. Which is a desirable spiritual exercise.
I was saying that
Tolerance has a bad press. This ceaseless effort to put up with other
people seems tame, almost ignoble, so that it sometimes repels generous
natures, and I don't recall many great men who have recommended it. St.
Paul certainly didn't. Nor did Dante. However, a few names occur to me,
and I will give them, to lend some authority to what I say. Going back
over two thousand years, and to India, there is the great Buddhist
Emperor Asoka, who set up inscriptions all over India, recording not his
own exploits but the need for mercy and mutual understanding and peace.
Going back about four hundred years, to Holland, there is the Dutch
scholar Erasmus, who stood apart from the religious fanaticism of the
Reformation and was abused by both parties, Catholic and Lutheran, in
consequence. In the same century there was the Frenchman, Montaigne,
subtle, intelligent, witty, who lived in his quiet country house and
wrote essays which still delight the civilised. And England, too: there
was John Locke, the philosopher; there was Sydney Smith, the Liberal and
liberalising divine; there was a man who recently died, Lowes
Dickinson, writer of a little book called A Modern Symposium, which
might be called the Bible of Tolerance. And Germany, too—yes, Germany:
there
was Goethe. All these men testify to the creed which I have been trying
to express: a negative creed, but very necessary for the salvation of
this crowded jostling modern world.
Two more remarks, and I have
done. The first is that it's very easy to see fanaticism in other
people, but difficult to spot in oneself. Take the evil of racial
prejudice. We can easily detect it in the Nazis; their conduct has been
infamous ever since they rose to power. But we ourselves—are we quite
guiltless? We are far less guilty than they are? Yet is there no racial
prejudice in the British Empire? Is there
no colour question? I
ask you to consider that, those of you to whom Tolerance is more than a
pious word. My other remark is to forestall a criticism. Tolerance is
not the same as weakness. Putting up with people does not mean giving in
to them. This complicates the problem. But the rebuilding of
civilisation is bound to be complicated. I only feel certain that unless
the Lord builds the House, they will labour in vain who build it.
Perhaps, when the house is completed, love will enter it, and the
greatest force in our private lives will also rule in public life."
By E. M. FORSTER, English Journalist and Commentator,
Delivered over radio of British Broadcasting System, July, 1941
Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. VIII, pp. 12-14
