The Sectarian of Society

A fixed creed is absolutely indispensable to freedom. For while men are
and should be various, there must be some communication between them if
they are to get any pleasure out of their variety. And an intellectual
formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not
depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy. If we all start with
the agreement that the sun and moon exist, we can talk about our different
visions of them. The strong-eyed man can boast that he sees the sun as a
perfect circle. The shortsighted man may say (or if he is an
impressionist, boast) that he sees the moon as a silver blur. The
colour-blind man may rejoice in the fairy-trick which enables him to live
under a green sun and a blue moon. But if once it be held that there is
nothing but a silver blur in one man's eye or a bright circle (like a
monocle) in the other man's, then neither is free, for each is shut up in
the cell of a separate universe.

But, indeed, an even worse fate, practically considered, follows from the
denim of the original intellectual formula. Not only does the individual
become narrow, but he spreads narrowness across the world like a cloud; he
causes narrowness to increase and multiply like a weed. For what happens
is this: that all the shortsighted people come together and build a city
called Myopia, where they take short-sightedness for granted and paint
short-sighted pictures and pursue very short-sighted policies. Meanwhile
all the men who can stare at the sun get together on Salisbury Plain and
do nothing but stare at the sun; and all the men who see a blue moon band
themselves together and assert the blue moon, not once in a blue moon, but
incessantly. So that instead of a small and varied group, you have
enormous monotonous groups. Instead of the liberty of dogma, you have the
tyranny of taste.

Allegory apart, instances of what I mean will occur to every one; perhaps
the most obvious is Socialism. Socialism means the ownership by the organ
of government (whatever it is) of all things necessary to production. If
a man claims to be a Socialist in that sense he can be any kind of man he
likes in any other sense--a bookie, a Mahatma, a man about town, an
archbishop, a Margate nigger. Without recalling at the moment
clear-headed Socialists in all of these capacities, it is obvious that a
clear-headed Socialist (that is, a Socialist with a creed) can be a
soldier, like Mr. Blatchford, or a Don, like Mr. Ball, or a Bathchairman
like Mr. Meeke, or a clergyman like Mr. Conrad Noel, or an artistic
tradesman like the late Mr. William Morris.

But some people call themselves Socialists, and will not be bound by what
they call a narrow dogma; they say that Socialism means far, far more