I provide below an essay by Norman F.
Webb entitled "Social Credit and the Christian Ethic" which may cast some
light on the Social Credit attitude toward work and "original sin." A
PDF is attached.
Wally
[BEGINNING OF ESSAY]
1
Reprinted from The Fig Tree of September, 1937 (see
notice on back cover).
SOCIAL
CREDIT
and the
CHRISTIAN ETHIC
by
NORMAN F. WEBB
THE SOCIAL CREDIT PRESS I63A Strand, London, W.C.2
.THREEPENCE
Social Credit and the Christian
Ethic
By NORMAN F. WEBB
Since the dawn of history the cry of reformers has
always been for a “change of heart.” Of the practical efficacy of that unqualified appeal we have no means of judging other than an
examination of the actual condition of the world as it is
today. Under that test it would appear to have failed. Nevertheless, the great
majority of society, with, it must be admitted,
considerable encouragement from the press and the pulpit, and the
pronouncements of bank chairmen, still holds blindly to
the belief that a change of heart is an essential preliminary to any change
for the better in social conditions, and denies
environment any claim as a means to a change of heart. In short, although we
like to think of this world of aeroplanes and scientific
wonders as very modern indeed, the truth is that the pre-Darwinian,
pre-Baconian attitude of mind still rules. In support of
this attitude Christ’s words are often quoted: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of
God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be
added unto you,” manifestly a searching truth; but it seems to me the weak point in the argument is always the fact that so few of
those who hold the view appear themselves to have experienced the change they recommend.
Until the rise of the Social Credit movement, there
has never been a constructive, co-ordinated opposition to the monopoly which this theory enjoys, and a challenge to it is long
overdue. As Major Douglas very profoundly says in his book
“Social Credit”: “Virtue
may flourish in the gutter, but if virtue can only flourish in the gutter, as some people would have
us believe, then it is time that the nature of virtue received severe
scrutiny.” Social Crediters, applying the discoveries of
Darwin, assert that if the conditions of life are changed, the heart will
respond. That, shortly, is the Social Credit declaration
of faith, and I believe it to be both sound and Christian. Christ fed the five
thousand in the wilderness. He was not of the
opinion that they would be more spiritually-minded fasting than
fed.
It is just here that the problem reaches a
deadlock. It is a sort of spiritual stalemate, and in the ensuing check and
pause an acute sense can plainly detect the premonitory
tremors of a vast society breaking up. It can serve no purpose to become either impatient or “rattled,” but it must be admitted that
the matter is urgent, since it is quite possible that the
future of an entire civilisation depends on its solution. If it were just a
question of giving a decision on the side of one or the
other school of thought–the change of heart or the change of environment–how
simple it would be; but we must not forget that the core
of the problem, our practical difficulty, is that both sides appear to lack
the essential dynamic that is needed to stir up the public
to a realistic sense of the present state of affairs.
My personal belief is that judgment cannot be given
to either; that the truth of the matter lies somewhere between the two; as I firmly believe Truth itself to be a balance of forces. I
suggest the two changes are interdependent. They must, so
to speak, occur together; the job is to be tackled at both ends
simultaneously, like a tunnelling of the Alps. In his book
“Social Credit,” contrasting the claims of what he calls the classical and
modern spirit which, broadly speaking, correspond to the
two schools of thought I am considering– Major Douglas says, “It is probable
that, as in many controversies, there is a good deal to be
said for both points of view, but it is even more probable that approximate
Truth lies in an appreciation of the fact that neither
conception is useful without the other.” Or, as I wish to suggest, it
may be just their combination that would produce the
spiritual impulse for which we are searching. For since it is a fact
that the nearest the human mind and language can get to a
statement of Truth is a paradox–“For whosoever will save his life, shall lose it,” and many others–it is quite probable that the
approach to a practical problem, even our very actions themselves, may require to be in a sense paradoxical in order to be
sound.
It is, you see, a “live” problem, a spiritual
problem, which is a conclusion that we Social Crediters have to some
extent avoided, for the reason that, as a class, we
possess that trained cast of mind that is intensely apprehensive of
emotional excess. I believe that it is our destiny to live
down that fear, as, indeed, in the near future many fears and prejudices will have to be overcome; and that the road by which it will
be achieved is through a realisation of the fact that the
scientific mind is the type of the modern religious mind, in fact the
neo-Christian. Science is knowledge. In action it is the
research and documentation of natural law. For that job
there is only one essential, besides training and common
intelligence, and that is integrity, singleness of purpose: the “single eye”
that, as Christ said, is the only means to enlightenment.
In that sense the scientist is truly religious in spirit. He knows that all
personal bias and preconception must be eliminated from
the mind; that facts as they come to light must be accepted, not for any moral
reason, involving punishment, but simply because it is
only in that obedient, impersonal, selfless spirit that Truth, his objective,
can be attained.
To me Christianity is realistic in the highest
degree; but it was not the Church, but two superficially mundane interests
that brought me to an appreciation of the realistic and
practical quality of Christ’s teaching. In the first place it was the
study of art, and later the study of that philosophy we
call Social Credit. And the more I examine them the more do Christ’s teaching and Social Credit identify themselves and fuse in my
mind. I put down here my interpretation of the fundamental
principles of Christianity, solely for the purposes of my analogy; not minding
though I must be treading on ground already covered and
re-covered by commentators and theologians, whose books I have never read and
never shall read. What I have found, then, in Christianity
is a technique of living; and it is with me that, whatever adherence
I may give to Social Credit or anything else, the
technique of personal existence must be my primary concern. I cannot,
I will not, let my interests be an escape from my personal
problems. Rather, I must solve my personal problems for the sake of prosecuting my interests more effectively.
Christ was a realist, the greatest that ever lived
by my definition of Realism, which is a concern with the immediate
present, with facts as they are. “The Kingdom of G od is w
ithin you,” said Christ, and that to my mind is an eminently realistic statement. It was Idealism that shoved Heaven up into the
sky, and that has persistently postponed human blessedness
to any time and place except here and now; when just here and now are all that
we really possess to work on. It is surely a devil’s trick
to rob us of the present, the only possession we can really call ours. And it
is surely a bedevilled world that displays all this
passion for securing the future and leaves the present to shift for itself. It
is because of the realism of their belief that Social
Crediters find themselves so markedly opposed to a world that sees no hope
other than in Plans–Four, Five, and Ten Year–and Boards
and Leagues, and Conferences; all idealistic, all projecting themselves outward from an unsolved, immediate present, into an
intellectual, Utopian dream of what might be, of what ought to be.
“Take care of the present and the future will take
care of itself,” is the lesson of both Christianity and Social Credit; and I say it is Realism as opposed to Idealism. It
may be impious, it certainly is
both unscientific and misguided, to try to see any
distance into the future: acceptance of, and obedience to, facts is the creed of both Christianity and science. Newman's “One step
enough for me” may be childishly simple; but it is
profoundly and truly a summing-up of the Christian point of view and, I would
add, the scientific also.
The Christian task, as I see it, is to attain the
right attitude towards life, to understand and carry out its laws as disclosed. What follows, follows; and it is just here that
faith comes into operation. It seems to me an
astonishingly foolish mistake, and one very frequently made, to confuse faith
with blind belief; they are in no way related. Faith might
be defined as an unshakable understanding that obedience to a known law
must produce correct results, even though, as Major
Douglas puts it, “the end of Man is unknown”; in other words, even though the actual nature of the ultimate result is hidden
from us. The Social Credit faith is of that nature, and
so, too, is the truly Christian, and it is with that quality of faith that we
need to inspire society. Lacking it, people dread
any change, and demand to see the whole social programme complete with blue
prints and a five-years unconditional guarantee. The best
analogy I can think of is learning to ride a bicycle. The doubting, human intelligence wants to be assured that its owner
will be held up before it can permit him to pedal off,
whereas the truth is that until he pedals off he cannot be
supported.
The individual soul, and the right understanding of
its relation to its original source, was for Christ the beginning and end of existence, and nothing recorded that He did or
said suggests even faintly that man exists for any other
purpose. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” as a
pronouncement, gives stable government its proper place
and emphasis, as a means to an end; but “. . . unto God the things that are
God’s,” postulates, without defining, the end to which
government is to be the means. The true, democratic, interpretation of the Sovereignty of the People, as defined by Social
Credit, is exactly this attitude applied to the structure
of the State and the place and the function of the individual, as that for
which and by which the State exists. Christ's short life
was spent in defence of the individual, and nearly two thousand years later
Social Crediters find themselves waging the same battle.
He clearly foresaw the danger of the elevation of means
into ends, which has culminated in the Collectivist State and its suppression
of the individual to the group. No dogmatic Church could
have bound Christ in His lifetime. It was only after His death, and not
until several centuries after, that it succeeded in
shackling and dogmatising his troublesome dynamic philosophy; but in the eyes of Him Who had created the philosophy, “the
sabbath was made for man, not man for the
sabbath.”
The identity of Christ’s teaching and what we call
Economic Democracy is, I believe, fundamental. The two are
in contact at every point–even to this extent, that the primary obstacle to
the realisation of both of them is the same. That obstacle
is, literally, the very devil, and its name, for want of a better term, is
Puritanism. To any that are hurt by that use of the word,
I say, give me a better or as good, and I will gladly substitute it. But puritanism as I understand it (erroneously connected
in many minds with purity) has, I affirm, nothing in
common with Christ’s teaching. Again we are in need of a definition; although,
indeed, this quality is so diffuse, so universal, so
“human,” as to be almost indefinable in a phrase. The will-to-power
perhaps comes nearest to the root of it, but that phrase
itself requires defining. Let me put it negatively.
When Christ, One Who for all His countrified
simplicity, understood more of life than anyone before or since, said to the young man who asked Him for a decision between his
brother and himself, “Man, who made Me a judge or a
divider over you?” He was demonstrating in the highest degree the opposite
impulse to that which I designate Puritanism . “Judge not,
that ye be not judged.” There is a law of life; and I think that Christ has plainly demonstrated for us that the primary fact of
existence is that we are here and conscious, for the
purpose of learning to understand it. The puritanical misconception is that we
are here to administer the law.
Is it surprising, therefore, that the world presents
the picture it does, when the individuals, who compose
society, each of them to a greater or lesser degree, conceive of themselves as
administrators of their own interpretation of a law that
has as yet been only faintly apprehended by a handful of choice
spirits?
Puritanism, as I said, is of the devil, clothing
the very deepest and darkest passion of the human mind–the
impulse to dominate over one's fellow mortals–in a moral disguise. A nd can we
wonder if the hedonist, who for all his shallowness, at
least has sufficient love for his neighbour to allow him to work out his own
salvation, gets away with so much of our sympathy? It is
the Puritan who has always been ready to shed blood in the
past (for there is no m ore terrible human phenomenon than the man who
identifies God with his own abysmal will-to-power), and it
will be the Puritan who will be ready to shed it in the future.
Christ’s realistic mission was to free man, and the
opposition He met is precisely the opposition presented to
Social Credit. The truth is that the Puritan element in man does not wish to
be free. Because its desire is to dominate over its
fellows, it opposes the idea of their enfranchisement, which is its own. The
Devil fears freedom above everything, and his own most of
all. It is quite natural then that when applied science comes along offering material freedom and abundance, the Puritan the Devil’s
advocate that lurks in each one of us–should be arrayed
against it; or that when we espouse a movement calling for a realistic
acceptance of the fact of economic freedom, we are met
with deadly resistance from the vested interests of the Prince of Darkness.
The foundation of the Christian teaching is Love.
It is a difficult matter to grasp, and very wide in its application, and the word itself has been so narrowly identified with
sexual attraction that we can hardly employ it profitably.
There are many definitions, but it will serve our purpose to take one; trust,
in the sense of absence of fear–“perfect Love casteth out
fear.” That form of love Social Credit represents. Social Crediters affirm a belief in the fundamental decency–goodness, if you
like–of human nature in the face of a world cowering
abjectly before its own degraded picture of itself. Coercive legislation, and
armaments, and leagues, are all the direct outcome of fear
and hatred–distrust of human nature. Into that dark abyss our present civilisation seems to be descending; and constructively opposed
to that world-wide tendency there are literally only two
forces, the teaching of Christ, and the philosophy of Social Credit, which I
say are one and the same. The actual clash that is to
herald the social breakup cannot be very long delayed. In the interval
still remaining, can these forces not be brought together,
and from their identification a real Christian democratic nucleus be created, round which the remnant of this present marvellous
and tragic civilisation might re-form? It is conceivable
that the actual break-up might even be averted, and the spirit of the age take
that sudden renewal and swing upward with which an
apparently dying piece of music sometimes starts off again
on a fresh and finer flight. That, as we know, is the vision that Social
Credit has opened up for some of us; but, so far, we have
not been able to communicate it to the great mass of the people. In this
combination I have suggested, may lie the secret of the
dynamic we search for, when the change of heart and the change of environment become, as I believe they should, complementary to one
another.
Printed by The Blackfriars Press, Ltd., Smith-Darrien Road,
Leicester.
[The following information is no longer valid:
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[END OF ESSAY]
Books which may be of interest to the student include:
"Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R. H. Tawney (Penguin-Pelican,
reprinted 1969), and "The Jews and Modern Capitalism" by Werner Sombart (New
York: Collier Edition, 1962).
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