Race in Utopia - Page 2

dissents, the history of fashionable society with
its cliques and sets and every political history with its cabals and
inner cabinets, witness to the struggle that goes on in the minds of
men to adjust themselves to a body larger indeed than themselves,
but which still does not strain and escape their imaginative
grasp.

The statesman, both for himself and others, must recognise this
inadequacy of grasp, and the necessity for real and imaginary
aggregations to sustain men in their practical service of the order
of the world. He must be a sociologist; he must study the whole
science of aggregations in relation to that World State to which his
reason and his maturest thought direct him. He must lend himself to
the development of aggregatory ideas that favour the civilising
process, and he must do his best to promote the disintegration of
aggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas, that keep men
narrow and unreasonably prejudiced one against another.

He will, of course, know that few men are even rudely consistent in
such matters, that the same man in different moods and on different
occasions, is capable of referring himself in perfect good faith,
not only to different, but to contradictory larger beings, and that
the more important thing about an aggregatory idea from the State
maker's point of view is not so much what it explicitly involves as
what it implicitly repudiates. The natural man does not feel he is
aggregating at all, unless he aggregates _against something. He
refers himself to the tribe; he is loyal to the tribe, and quite
inseparably he fears or dislikes those others outside the tribe. The
tribe is always at least defensively hostile and usually actively
hostile to humanity beyond the aggregation. The Anti-idea, it would
seem, is inseparable from the aggregatory idea; it is a necessity of
the human mind. When we think of the class A as desirable, we think
of Not-A as undesirable. The two things are as inevitably connected
as the tendons of our hands, so that when we flatten down our little
fingers on our palms, the fourth digit, whether we want it or not,
comes down halfway. All real working gods, one may remark, all gods
that are worshipped emotionally, are tribal gods, and every attempt
to universalise the idea of God trails dualism and the devil after
it as a moral necessity.

When we inquire, as well as the unformed condition of terrestrial
sociology permits, into the aggregatory ideas that seem to satisfy
men, we find a remarkable complex, a disorderly complex, in the
minds of nearly all our civilised contemporaries. For example, all
sorts of aggregatory ideas come and go across the chameleon surfaces
of my botanist's mind. He has a strong feeling for