FOR A NEW WORLD

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22142, 22 June 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

FOR A NEW WORLD

BY KOTAHE

CREATING ITS CITIZENS

While on the surface of modern life, as we see it expressing itself in apparently inextricable economic confusion and political unrest and change, there is little to mark any definite progress to the stabilities and certainties for ■which a weary world strives and prays and hopes, there are many indications that thought is beginning to clarify, and that out of the welter of conflicting ideals and aspirations paths that may lead somewhere are outlining themselves with more or less precision. Sometimes the gleam has come to a solitary thinker; sometimes it embodies itself in a movement.

If one can accept the Communist idea, then, of course, everything is plain enough. There has never been a theory more exact, more cut-and-dried. If by the substitution of a new order carefully regimented and controlled in even- part we can solve all our problems and bring in a new and happy world, then everything is perfectly simple. Change the structure of society, compel those to come in who have any doubts about it, and the new environment will inevitably produce the new and happy man. Alter the conditions of living and the man will change in harmony with them. But life is not as simple as that. It is admirable to have an unlimited faith in man, but after all we have to consider the quality of the material with which we are building, and any social reorganisation will find that in the last issue everything depends on the human factor.

The Individual So many to-day, despairing of meeting the real crux of the problem by a change in external framework alone, are turning also to what they fee! to be the most vital matter, the building of the better man. It is easy to ridicule that emphasis on the individual. To a world in a desperate hurry to get things done, such slow foundation work seems a mere begging of the real question. The world has had plenty of time to tackle and perform this task, and has made precious little of it. It is simply suggesting a futile alternative, to hold up the march of mankind toward the new goals that are at last almost in sight. Christianity has been trying to make the better men and women for nearly two thousand years, and what has it really achieved? One can sympathise with the impatience of earnest men who have decided that the problem must be met now from the outside rather than from within.

But there have been striking revivals in ! our own time of the essentially Christian faith in the supreme importance of the individual in any genuine movement toward a satisfactory social change. Krishnarnurti has impressed many minds with his proclamation of the supreme urgency of the individual's problem. He insists that the individual must cut himself off from everything that- tradition and custom and his desire for security impose upon him from without. He will have no institution to bolster up weak humanity. Man must face his ultimate problem alone. No outside authority can show him the way There is no way that one can communicate to others. " So I say, do not seek n way, a method. There is no method, no way to truth. Do not seek a way." And as there is no way so there are no teachers We want guidance we demand security, and build our systems or organise our lives to win these. But "action must become truly individual. Now, I am not using that word 'individual' in the sense, of placing the individual against the many. By individual action I mean action that is born of complete comprehension, complete understanding by the individual, understanding not imposed bv others."

The Oxford Group

In a very different fashion, but still stressing the importance of the individual. is the way of life advocated by the Oxford Group Movement, which has already profoundly touched many countries. Dr. Buchman, the founder of the movement, thus defines its objectives: "The Oxford Group is a Christian revolution, whose concern is vital Christianity Its aim is a new social order under the Dictatorship of the Spirit of God making for better human relationships, for unselfish co-operation, for cleaner business, cleaner politics, for the elimination of political, industrial and racial antagonisms." In the view of the group the changed world will come from changed men and women. Get individual men and women dedicated to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount and conforming their lives to its teachings, get them practising and working for the Christian ideas of brotherhood and service, and there will be a new spirit abroad in society, transforming it from within. " Once," says Canon Streeter. " the problem was to make men keep the Commandments; nowadays it is to make them believe that they ought to be kept. The result is that this country is living on the spiritual momentum of our fathers expressed in a social and educational tradition. Morally we are living on our capital." So the Oxford Group insists on the centrality of the individual. It brings the demands of the Christian ethic home to the individual, and seeks a new world in a citizenry deliberately and personally and sacrificially consecrated to the essentially Christian way of life. The injustices and tyrannies that mar so much of modern society xvill vanish as Christian standards become effective in a steadily-increasing proportion of the men and women of to-dav.

The Bigger Man That idea of the centrality of the individual in every scheme of social reform has gripped some of the leading advocates of the socialistic view. Bernard Shaw has long felt that we must have bigger men if we are to make a success of the new order for which he has been working for more than half a century. His bigger man was to come by the curious device of prolonging human life. He thought that if men could have more time to work in, if they could, by controlling the evolutionary principle, guarantee three hundred years of thought and action to the individual, the world's problems would soon solve themselves. H. G. Wells, who dreams of a new socialistic world-order, sees that its possibility depends on the development of special individuals who will be big enough to take control. He declares that the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is all moonshine, a mere catch-phrase to seduce the simpleminded. Russia still shouts the slogan, but has long since abandoned it in practice. The mass still depends on the leaders, and always will. So he is concentrating not on the raising of individual standards all round, but on the creation by intensive education of his Samurai class, who will act as receivers and disposers of the vast resources his socialistic world-state will take over when it becomes a reality. To further his idea of education for leadership in the new State he wrote his "World History," his "Science of Life" and his "Work, Viealth and Happiness of the World," a complete survey in ail the vital fields of what he terms the "world citizen's ideology."