On Europe and Asia

With regard to the opinion expressed by a very prominent capitalist that all might have been well in China if we had taken away the missionaries and presumably only left the merchants, I personally should say (as a slight amendment) that all might have been well if we had taken away the merchants and left the missionaries. But for that minor differentiation, I should be quite prepared to accept the whole substance and structure of his sentence.

But the text has in this connexion a further relation to the truth. I do not mean, of course, that the fault has been all on one side 3 or that there are no borderlines where the characters are mingled or exchanged. There may have been unpleasant missionaries who merely haggled and exploited like merchants. There are certainly unpleasant merchants who preach and moralize like misisonaries. But the general distinction remains 5 and it is one which must be, for any intelligent person, altogether to the advantage of the missionaries. If our civilization has anything to give the other populations of the planet, it must surely be a matter of giving a man ideas and not merely of selling him trousers or boots or a billycock hat. As it is, we have suffered from getting the Chinaman to change his hat without in the least changing his head 5 and have successfully sold him an English pair of trousers with an American revolver in the hip pocket. Our mood about the expansion of European methods in Asia has always been one of most muddled and immoral inconsistency. We have insisted on their having machinery and objected to their having machine-guns j we have often allowed them to enter the halls of our own national colleges and then forbidden them to take part in their own national councils j we have laughed at them for wearing their own costume and then laughed at them again for adopting oursj we have called the Chinaman a heathen Chinee when he was immovable and a Yellow Peril when he began to movej we have derided him for being deaf to Europeans and then accused him of lending an ear to Russians 3 and finally we express a reasonable apprehension about the destructive danger of his prolonged civil warSj and wind up by saying with a smile that they are never anything but sham fights. One does not need to be Pro-Chinese, still less Anti-European, to see that our neglect of Asiatic problems has here brought us into a rather hazy and irrational frame of mind. The Chinese question is really a serious question, and it is time the Chinaman was considered seriously as he is in himself and not as he appears to us, as the embodiment of something extravagant and extreme at the ends of the earth. I do not propose to deal here with any of the purely political questions of military or diplomatic policy j but I should like to suggest one or two neglected aspects of the philosophy of the whole mattery and to begin by saying that whoever else is right, I am quite sure that the eminent plutocrat was wrong, when he said that all the mischief had been done by missionaries.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic. Thus there are wandering about the world, at any given moment, a very large number of unconscious missionaries. They do as a fact preach wherever they go J sometimes they are so fanatical as to practise what they preachy but they never know that they are preaching. They are under the extraordinary delusion that the thing they practise is universally regarded as practical politics. They imply by their every action a certain type of thought j though it is not a very thoughtful type of thought. Every gesture asserts a certain notion of social superiority j but it is a notion which they themselves have never very thoroughly thought out. And it is exactly here that the extension of the externals of our civilizaion is now breaking down. It is breaking down because it is external j and because it has been extended too far from its base. Most of the matters involved did originally depend upon some moral or philosophical idea when they first emerged out of European civilization j but they do not know how to defend themselves morally and philosophically when they have wandered so far from Europe. Unfortunately, where they are insufficient, they are still self-sufficient. They have forgotten their theoretical basis j and are in the deplorably weak position of being merely practical. They are dogmatic without having a dogma.

In short, the European takes a superior tonej but not about the things in which he is really superior. In this matter there is a very queer irony and contradiction 3 and even a reversal of parts. Not only has Asia borrowed all the wrong things from Eu-rope, but Europe has also very largely borrowed all the wrong things from Asia. To put the matter in a compact and convenient material image, we may take the question of vesture, especially in the religious form of vestment, and compare it with the religious ideas that are behind the form. As a matter of fact, the costume of many people in the East really is much more beautiful than that of most people in the West. It could hardly be more hideous. But it does, in fact, follow more of the free and flowing and yet traditional lines that are found in the highest culture of Hellas and in all other humanistic moments of humanity. It is generally more natural and yet more symbolic than the costume of modern European people, or at any rate of modern European males. But that Asiatic element has never spread to Europe. There is no particular probability of stockbrokers in London suddenly appearing in the long peacock-coloured robes, that are to be seen on many Arabian beggars. It is not particularly likely that a banker in Birmingham will add to his dignity with a towering turban surmounted by a magnificent streaming plume. These things, in which oriental humanity has really remained more human, show no particular sign of spreading at all. The tendency, of course, is all the other way. It is the Arab beggar who tends to break out into the appearance of the stockbroker, at least in patches. It is the Indian prince who hastily disguises himself as the Birmingham banker. The very ugliest thing that our civilization ever produced, the costume and habit of the industrial nineteenth century in the big towns, that has really spread over the whole world, as Christianity has never spread, as chivalry has never spread, as monogamy has never spread, as democracy and the civic ideal have never spread. We have not succeeded in making the remote Asiatic feel like a Christian j but we have succeeded in making him look like a cad. This seems to me one of the strangest and most

MARIN COUNTY FREE LIBRARY SAN RAFAEL, CALIFORNIA sinister of all historical contradictions j when we consider what Christendom has had to give, and what it has given.

But while this blight of vulgarity was spreading from Europe to Asia, something else was also spreading from Asia to Europe. And the strange thing is that this also was a blight. Its influence was not so immediately apparent, nor perhaps so widely distributed as the mere fashion of Cockney culture and commonplace clothes. But it has been considerable 5 and, as I think, very deplorable. What has come to us out of Asia, whatever else there may be in Asia, has been despair. It has been all those negative and anarchic ideals of disdain for the individual, of indiflFerence to the romance of real life, of pessimism and the paralysis of the fighting spirit. It is ideas that have come to us out of the depths of Asia J and especially all the wrong ideas. I know, of course, that there are many other ideas in so vast and complex a continent j and many that are by no means so wrong.

But I am talking, not of the ideas that are deepest in Asia, of which I necessarily know little 5 but of the Asiatic ideals that have bitten deepest into Europe, of which I know only too much..And it strikes me as an astonishing antithesis and reversal that neither of the two great civilizations should have given its best to the other. We have given them a disfigurement^ and they have given us a disease. Now it is really in the matter of ideas that our own civilization is superior. There are some who do not believe this^ because they always assume that deep ideas must be depressing ideas. They cannot bring themselves to believe, what is the truth, that the deepest of all ideas are inspiring ideas. Of those courageous and invigorating conceptions, the conceptions that make life possible to live, Christendom has had infinitely more than any other culture j more of the idea of free-will j more of the idea of personal chivalry and charity j more of the clean wind of hope. The metaphysics and morals of these things have been worked out by our fathers fully as deeply and delicately as any of the dark and disenchanted metaphysics of Asia. But the European travelling in Asia does not seem to know that he represents these things. He is still under the innocent delusion that he only represents some firm for selling hair-grease or golf-clubs. And when he comes back from the East he is quite as likely as not to be talking Eastern pessimism in the intervals of boasting of Western commercialism. Having never learnt his own religion, he is very likely to learn somebody else's 5 and that one which is really inferior to his own. If we consider these things, we may possibly begin to see a new meaning in the much-abused word "Missionary."