What I Believe: Essay

Author: Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970)

I do not believe in Belief. But this is an age of faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution in a world where ignorance rules, and science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy- they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long. But for the moment they are not enough, their action is no stronger than a flower, battered beneath a military jack-boot. They want stiffening, even if the process coarsens them. Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all. Herein I probably differ from most people, who believe in Belief, and are only sorry they cannot swallow even more than they do. My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St. Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in that Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is: ‘Lord, I disbelieve-help thou my unbelief.’

I have, however, to live in an Age of Faith- the sort of epoch I used to hear praised when I was a boy. It is extremely unpleasant, really. It is bloody in every sense of the word. And I have to keep my end up in it. Where do I start ?

With personal relationships. Here is something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty. Not absolutely solid, for psychology has split and shattered the idea of a ‘Person’, and has shown that there is something incalculable in each of us, which may at any moment rise to the surface and destroy our normal balance. We don’t know what we are like. We can’t know what other people are like. How, then, can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm ? In theory we can not. But in practice we can and do. Though A is not unchangeably A or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two. For the purpose of living one has to assume that the personality is solid, and the ‘self’ is an entity, and to ignore all contrary evidence. And since to ignore evidence is one of the characteristics of faith, I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal relationships.

Starting from them, I get a little order into the contemporary chaos. One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do. The moral of which is that I must, myself, be as reliable as possible, and this I try to be. But reliability is not a matter of contract – that is the main difference between the world of personal relationships and the world of business relationships. It is a matter for the heart, which signs no documents. In other words, reliability is impossible unless there is a natural warmth. Most men possess this warmth, though they often have bad luck and get chilled. Most of them, even when they are politicians, want to keep faith. And one can, at all events, show one’s own little light here, one’s own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend. Personal relations are despised today. They are regarded as bourgeois luxuries, as products of a time of fair weather which is now past, and we are urged to get rid of them, and to dedicate ourselves to some movement or cause instead. I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have shocked Dante, though Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome. Probably one will not be asked to make such an agonizing choice. Still, there lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer, and there is even a terror and a hardness in this creed of personal relationships, urbane and mild though it sounds. Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do- down with the State, say I, which means that the State would down me.

This brings me along to Democracy, ‘even Love, the Beloved Republic, which feeds upon Freedom and lives.’ Democracy is not a Beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent it deserves our support. It does start from the assumption that the individual is important, and that all types are needed to make a civilization. It does not divide its citizens into the bossers and the bossed- as an efficiency-regime tends to do. The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere. They found religions, great or small, or they produce literature and art, or they do disinterested scientific research, or they may be what is called ‘ordinary people’, who are creative in their private lives, bring up their children decently, for instance, or help their neighbours. All these people need to express themselves; they can not do so unless society allows them to do so, and the society which allows them most liberty is a democracy.

Democracy has another merit. It allows criticism, and if there is not public criticism there are bound to be hushed-up scandals. That is why I believe in the Press, despite all its lies and vulgarity, and why I believe in Parliament. Parliament is often sneered at because it is a Talking Shop. I believe in it because it is a talking shop. I believe in the Private Member who makes himself a nuisance. He gets snubbed and is told that he is cranky or ill-informed, but he does expose abuses which would otherwise never have been mentioned, and very often an abuse gets put right just by being mentioned. Occasionally, too, a well meaning public official starts losing his head in the cause of efficiency, and thinks himself God Almighty. Such officials are particularly frequent in the Home Office. Well, there will be questions about them in Parliament sooner or later, and then they will have to mind their steps. Whether Parliament is either a representative body or an efficient one is questionable, but I value it because it criticizes and talks, and because its chatter gets widely reported.

So Two Cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that.

What about Force, though ? While we are trying to be sensitive and advanced and affectionate and tolerant, an unpleasant question pops up: does not all society rest upon force ? If a government can not count upon the police and the army, how can it hope to rule ? And if an individual gets knocked on the head or sent to a labour camp, of what  significance are his opinions ?

This dilemma does not worry me as much as it does some. I realize that all society rests upon force. But all the great creative actions, all the decent human relations, occur during the intervals when force has not managed to come to the front. These intervals are what matter. I want them to be as frequent and as lengthy as possible, and I call them ‘civilization.’ Some people idealize force and pull it into the foreground and worship it, instead of keeping it in the background as long as possible. I think they make a mistake, and I think that their opposites, the mystics, err even more when they declare that force does not exist. I believe that it exists, and that one of our jobs is to prevent it from getting out of its box. It gets out sooner or later, and then it destroys us and all the lovely things which we have made. But it is not out all the time, for the fortunate reason that the strong are so stupid. Consider their conduct for a moment in the Niebelung’s Ring. The giants there have the guns, or in other words the gold; but they do nothing with it, they do not realize that they are all-powerful, with the result that the catastrophe is delayed and the castle of Walhalla, insecure but glorious, fronts the storms. Fafnir, coiled round his hoard, grumbles and grunts; we can hear him under Europe today; the leaves of the wood already tremble, and the Bird calls its warnings uselessly. Fafnir will destroy us, but by a blessed dispensation he is stupid and slow, and creation goes on just outside the poisonous blast of his breath. The Nietzschean would hurry the monster up, the mystic would say he did not exist, but Wotan, wiser than either, hastens to create warriors before doom declares itself. The Valkyries are symbols not only of courage but of intelligence; they represent the human spirit snatching its opportunity while the going is good, and one of them even finds time to love. Brunnhilde’s last song hymns the recurrence of love, and since it is the privilege of art to exaggerate, she goes even further, and proclaims the love which is eternally triumphant and feeds upon freedom, and lives.

So that is what I feel about force and violence. It is, alas ? The ultimate reality on this earth, but it does not always get to the front. Some people call its absences ‘decadence’; I call them ‘civilization’ and find in such interludes the chief justification for the human experiment. I look the other way until fate strikes me. Whether this is due to courage or to cowardice in my own case I can not be sure. But I know that if men had not looked the other way in the past, nothing of any value would survive.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal, and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit. No millennium seems likely to descend upon humanity; no better and stronger League of Nations will be instituted: no form of Christianity and no alternative to Christianity will bring peace to the world or integrity to the individual ; no ‘change of heart’ will occur. And yet we need not despair, indeed, we can not despair; the evidence of history shows us that men have always insisted on behaving creatively under the shadow of the sword; that they have done their artistic and scientific and domestic stuff for the sake of doing it, and that we had better follow their example under the shadow of the aero planes. Others, with more vision or courage than myself, see the salvation of humanity ahead, and will dismiss my conception of civilization as pasty, a sort of tip-and-run game. Certainly it is presumptuous to say that we cannot improve, and that Man, who has only been in power for a few thousand years, will never learn to make use of his power. All I mean is that, if people continue to kill one another as they do, the world cannot get better than it is, and that since there are more people than formerly, and their means for destroying one another superior, the world may well get worse. What is good in people- and consequently in the world- is their insistence on creation, their belief in friendship and loyalty for their own sakes; and though Violence remains and is, indeed, the major partner in this muddled establishment, I believe that creativeness remains too, and will always assume direction when violence sleeps. So, though I am not an optimist, I cannot agree with Sophocles that it were better never to have been born. And although, like Horace, I see no evidence that each batch of births is superior to the last, I leave the field open for the more complacent view. This is such a difficult moment to live in, one cannot help getting gloomy and also a bit rattled, and perhaps short-sighted.

In search of a refuge, we may perhaps turn to hero-worship. But here we shall get no help, in my opinion. Hero-worship is a dangerous vice, and one of the minor merits of a democracy is that it does not encourage it, or produce that unmanageable type of citizen known as the Great Man. It produces instead different kinds of small men- a much finer achievement. But people who cannot get interested in the variety of life, and cannot make up their own minds, get discontented over this, and they long for a hero to bow down before and to follow blindly. It is significant that a hero is an integral part of the authoritarian stock-in-trade today. An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness- much as plums have to be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable. One hero at the top and a smaller one each side of him is a favourite arrangement and the timid and the bored are comforted by the trinity and, bowing down, feel exalted and strengthened.

No, I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper. Every now and then one reads in the newspapers some such statements as: ‘The coup d’etat appears to have failed, and Admiral Toma’s whereabouts is at present unknown.’ Admiral Toma had probably every qualification for being a Great Man- an iron will, personal magnetism, dash, flair, sexlessness- but fate was against him, so he retires to unknown whereabouts instead of parading history with his peers. He fails with a completeness which no artist and no lover can experience, because with them the process of creation is itself an achievement, whereas with him the only possible achievement is success.

I believe in aristocracy, though- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke. I give no examples- it is Tisky to do that- but the reader may as well consider whether this is the type of person he would like to meet and to be, and whether (going farther with me) he would prefer that this type should not be an ascetic one. I am against asceticism myself. I am with the old Scotsman who wanted less chastity and more delicacy. I do not feel that my aristocrats are a real aristocracy if they thwart their bodies, since bodies are the instruments through which we register and enjoy the world. Still, I do not insist. This is not a major point. It is clearly possible to be sensitive, considerate and plucky and yet be an ascetic too, if anyone possesses the first three qualities, I will let him in ! On they go – an invincible army, yet not a victorious one. The aristocrats, the elect, the chosen, the Best People – all the words that describe them are false and all attempts to organize them fail. Again and again Authority, seeing their value, has tried to net them and to utilize them as the Egyptian Priesthood or the Christian Church or the Chinese Civil Service or the Group Movement, or some other worthy stunt. But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut, they are no longer in the room; their temple, as one of them remarked, is the Holiness of the Heart’s Affection, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.

With this type of person knocking about, and constantly crossing one’s path if one has eyes to see or hands to feel, the experiment of earthly life cannot be dismissed as a failure. But it may well be hailed as a tragedy, the tragedy being that no device has been found by which these private decencies can be transmitted to public affairs. As soon as people have power they go crooked and sometimes dotty as well, because they possession of power lifts them into a region where normal honesty never pays. For instance, the man who is selling newspapers outside the Houses of Parliament can safely leave his papers to go for a drink and his cap beside them: anyone who takes a paper is sure to drop a copper into the cap. But the men who are inside the Houses of Parliament – they cannot trust one another like that, still less can the Government they compose trust other governments. No caps upon the pavement here, but suspicion, treachery and armaments. The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink; the nations of today behave to each other worse than they ever did in the past, they cheat, rob, bully and bluff, make war without notice, and kill as many women and children as possible; whereas primitive tribes were at all events restrained by taboos. It is a humiliating outlook – though the greater the darkness, the brighter shine the little lights, reassuring one another, signalling: “Well, at all events, I’m still here. I don’t like it very much, but how are you ?” Unquenchable lights of my aristocracy! Signals of the invincible army ! ‘Come along – anyway, let’s have a good time while we can.’ I think they signal that too.

The Saviour of the future – if ever he comes – will not preach a new Gospel. He will merely utilize my aristocracy, he will make effective the good will and the good temper which are already existing. In other words, he will introduce a new technique. In economics, we are told that if there was a new technique of distribution, there need be no poverty, and people would not starve in one place while crops were being ploughed in another. A similar change is needed in the sphere of morals and politics. The desire for it is by no means new; it was expressed, for example, in theological terms by Jacopone da Todi over six hundred years ago. ‘Ordina questo amore, O tu che m’ami,’ he said: ‘O thou who lovest me – set this love in order.’ His prayer was not granted, and l do not myself believe that it ever will be, but here, and not through a change of heart, is our probable route. Not by becoming better, but by ordering and distributing his native goodness, will Man shut up Force into its box, and so gain time to explore the universe and to set his mark upon it worthily. At present he only explores it at odd moments, when Force is looking the other way, and his divine creativeness appears as a trivial by-product, to be scrapped as soon as the drums beat and the bombers hum.

Such a change, claim the orthodox, can only be made by Christianity, and will be made by it in God’s good time; man always has failed and always will fail to organize his own goodness, and it is presumptuous of him to try. This claim – solemn as it is- leaves me cold. I cannot believe that Christianity will ever cope with the present world-wide mess, and I think that such influence as it retains in modern society is due to the money behind it, rather than to its spiritual appeal. It was a spiritual force once, but the indwelling spirit will have to be restated if it is to calm the waters again, and probably restated in a non Christian form. Naturally a lot of people, and people who are not only good but able and intelligent, will disagree here; they will vehemently deny that Christianity has failed, or they will argue that its failure proceeds from the wickedness of men, and really proves its ultimate success. They have Faith, with a large F. My faith has a very small one, and I only intrude it because these are strenuous and serious days, and one likes to say what one thinks while speech is comparatively free; it may not be free much longer.

The above are the reflections of an individualist and a liberal who has found liberalism crumbling beneath him and at first felt ashamed. Then, looking around, he decided there was no special reason for shame, since other people, whatever they felt, were equally insecure. And as for individualism – there seems no way of getting off this, even if one wanted to. The dictator-hero can grind down his citizens till they are all alike, but he cannot melt them into a single man. That is beyond his power. He can order them to merge, he can incite them to mass-antics, but they are obliged to be born separately, and to die separately, and, owing to these unavoidable termini, will always be running off the totalitarian rails. The memory of birth and the expectation of death always lurk within the human being, making him separate from his fellows and consequently capable of intercourse with them. Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it ! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour. 

Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) was a well known novelist and essayist. This essay is taken from his collection of essays Two Cheers for Democracy published in 1951. It reveals Forster’s belief in individualism, liberal spirit in society and politics, and is marked by clarity of thought and tolerance.

Glossary

Belief: faith or trust in any religion or creed

Militant: at war, supporting war like feelings, aggressive

Formulate: create

Rent: divided, torn apart

Persecution: to torture or make one suffer for his belief

Subservient pimp: to show slavish bent of mind

Jackboot: strong leather boots which come over the knees and are generally worn by soldiers

Stiffening: strengthening

Sparingly: not frequently

Erasmus (1466-1536): Dutch Catholic priest, scholar and teacher. He had a great influence on the ‘new learning’ of the Renaissance and advocated liberalism in all spheres of learning.

Montaigne (1533-1592): French author and essayist with a sharp and probing mind

Moses: prophet and leader of the Jews in the Old Testament, according to which he was given the Ten Commandments by Jehovah on Mount Sinai

St. Paul: orginally named Saul. Was converted to Christianity. He became one of the apostles of Christianity and was martyred at Rome in 67 A.D.

Mount Moriah: Biblical name of a hill in East Jerusalem, which was the site of Solomon’s Temple

Elysian Field: according to Greek mythology the happy afterlife given to Greek heroes after their death

Lord I disbelieve: St. Paul’s Prayer – Lord I believe, help thou my belief – which the author has twisted around to support his argument

Age of Faith: ironically termed or used to denote times of basis and prejudice

Psychology has split and shattered the ideas of  a ‘person’: the theory in psychology that each human being is made up of many personalities

Contemporary: belonging to one’s times

Entity: complete whole

Contrary evidence: opposing facts

Moral: the lesson to be learnt

Bourgeois luxuries: comforts of the middle class

Fair weather: good or favourable times

Scandalize: to horrify or shock

Dante (1265-1321): famous Italian poet

Brutus (85-42 B.C.): Roman statesman who conspired to murder Julius Caesar

Cassius: chief conspirator in the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar: Roman General, statesman, conqueror of the Gauls, and assassinated in the Senate in Rome 

Lowest circle of Hell: according to Dante there were several levels in Hell to which dead souls were condemned according to the sins they committed on Earth

Urbane: polite, courteous

Counter to the claims: go in the opposite direction

Love, the Beloved Republic: quotation from Swinburne’s poem Hertha

Assumption: factors taken as given

Vulgarity: coarse behaviour

Sneered: made fun of, showing contempt

Talking Shop: where ideas and views may be discussed openly and freely

Snubbed: checked

Home Office: Government Department which deals with domestic affairs of the country

Chatter gets widely reported: all the discussions are made public

Two Cheers: usually three cheers are given on occasions of victory etc., but Forster explains his usage of two Cheers

Force: the various forms of power that are used in any society to achieve an end

Dilemma: to have problems in making choice

Niebelung’s Ring: Opera composed by German musician Richard Wagner in which he united the Nordic myths

Walhalla: In Nordic mythology, the heaven for dead heroes

Fafnir: the dragon who guards Niebelung’s hoard of gold

Blessed dispensation: by the mercy of God

Nietzschean: follower of German philosopher Nietzsche (1844-1900) who decried religion and praised superman and the use of force

Wotan: Nordic god named Wotan by Richard Wagner otherwise known as Oden or Woden

Valkyries: Odin’s daughters in Norse (of Norway) mythology

Snatching its opportunity while the going is good: seizing the change when the time is right

Brunnehilde: Chief of the Valkyries and mighty warrior

Ultimate reality: final truth

Millennium: period of one thousand years

League of Nations: 1920-1946, founded after World War I to ensure peace in Europe but proved to be ineffective and could not prevent World War II

Shadow of Sword: in times of war

Vision: foresight

Salvation: rescue

Pasty: unhealthy

Tip and run game: term taken from cricket to hit the ball lightly and take a quick run. The author means that a hasty view of civilization is not to be taken.

Presumpuous: doing something without authority

Violence: the use of various forms of force in society

Muddled establishment: confused society

Sophocles: (c. 496-406 B.C.) famous Greek dramatist

Horace: well known poet

Leave the field open: allow the entrance of, here, ideas

Related: confused

Stock in trade: the usual practices that a person employs to influence or impress others

Plums have to be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable: the situation has to be altered in such a way that it is acceptable by the public, as plums have to be added to a bad tasting dessert to make it tasty

Trinity: group of three important people

Come a cropper: when it is a failure

Coup d’ etat: an attempt to overthrow the government by sudden, illegal and violent methods

Parading history: becoming famous in history

Aristocracy: nobility, upper class of society

Pluck: courage

Swankiness: show off, boasting

Asceticism: to have very strict self discipline

Thwart: stop

Register: understand

Authority: persons or bodies or groups in control over others in society

Egyptian Priesthood, Christian Church, Chinese Civil Service, Group Movements: organized bodies which have helped the governments of various countries through the ages in ruling and controlling the country

Holiness of the Heart’s Affection: quotation from Keat’s letter to Bailey on 22^nd Nov. 1917 – meaning that the heart will accord respect to that which it holds truthful and honest

Dotty: eccentric

Coppers: coins

Taboos: prohibited by society or religion

Gospel: the record of Christ’s life and teachings recorded in four books by four of the evangelists

Theological: religious

Jacopone da Todi (1230-1306): Italian religious poet

Native: inborn

Drums beat and bombers hum: as war approaches

Orthodox: conventional

Calm the waters: bring peace

Individualist: one who believes in the free and independent actions and thoughts of the individual

Liberal: favourable to changes and reforms in society and politics

Grind down his citizens till they are alike: force them to behave in a uniform way

Mass antics: foolish behaviour by a large group of people

Termini: limits, endings

Totalitarian: related to a state which does not allow loyalty to a political party except the one which is in power

          - From the book: Modern Essays / Orient Longman Limited, India