418
STANLEY DIAMOND
We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle
of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the de–
formation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion
of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a
progress for which succeeding generations my have to pay dearly. I need
only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the
results of "soil-erosion" - the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale
for two generations, for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to
dearth and desert. I would not have it thought that I condemn a society
because of its material ruin, for that would I:;e to make its material success
a sufficient test of its excellence; I mean only that a wrong attitude towards
nature implies somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the con–
sequence is an inevitable doom. For a long time we have believed in nothing
but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of
life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon
which God allows us to live upon this planet. And without sentimentalizing
the life of the savage, we might practise the humility to observe, in some
of the societies upon which we look down as primitive or backward, the
operation of a social-religious-artistic complex which we should emulate
upon a higher plane. We have been accustomed to regard "progress" as
always integral; and have yet to learn that it is only by an effort and a
discipline, greater than society has yet seen the need of imposing upon it–
self, that material knowledge and power is gained without loss of spiritual
knowledge and power.
The struggle to recover the sense of relation to nature
and to God, the recognition that even the most primitive feelings should be
part of our heritage, seems to me to be the explanation and justification of
the life of D. H. Lawrence, and the excuse for his aberrations.
But we need
not only to learn how to look at the world with the eyes of a Mexican Indian
- and I hardly think that Lawrence succeeded - and we certainly cannot af–
ford to stop there. We need to know how to see the world as the Christian
Fathers saw it; and the purpose of reascending to origins is that we should
l:e able to return, with greater spiritual knowledge, to our own situation.
We need to recover the sense of religious fear, so that it may
be
overcome
by religious hope.
Both the cultural and countercultural conservative are searching
for sacred spaces in which to live, are trying to recreate culture as
communion.
If
either group, as a consequence of its fear of the other,
is captured by the establishment, we wil! have acute fascism. The only
alternative is that they come to terms with each other, against the
establishment, and £Or this they must create a politics.
