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Title: Skyscapes and Goodwill
Author: Dora Marsden
Date: 1914
Language: en
Topics: egoism, The Egoist
Source: Retrieved on 09/25/2021 from https://modjourn.org/issue/bdr519967/
Notes: Originally published in The Egoist Volume I Number 2 (January 15, 1914)

Dora Marsden

Skyscapes and Goodwill

If the skill of a doctor were bespoken to effect the cure of a madman,

and he proceeded to attempt the systematising of the insane ravings

while giving no heed to the existence of the madness one would say there

was little to choose from in soundness of mind between doctor and

patient. Yet no one marvels when from all those who have a nostrum to

offer as a cure for the disease of civilisation and its complications no

voice is heard drawing attention to the species of sickness which is its

antecedent cause. It remains nameless and unsuspected, to be indicated

only by a description of its symptoms.

It begins with the failure of the self-assertive principle of the vital

power: a failure of courage. Tolerated, it acts on the power of the

heart and thins it out to a degree at which it is too light to retain

its seat there, and forthwith mounts to the head where transmutation

begins. The power of the heart, already grown virtueless and thin,

distills poisonous clammy vapours which emerge from the head. As they

grow denser they settle, a heavy cloud of mist about the herd.

Descending, they breathe a film upon the eyes and dim the senses.

Within, the heart left tenantless of power is contracted by ghostly

hands—the hands of fear. The face becomes pallid under the

Thought-wreaths with the chiliness of fear. The vapours become the

breath of his nostrils and are breathed in as Duty and Circumspection.

They penetrate each limb and fibre, inoculate with obedience and virtue.

The hands fold meekly: the man walks with circumspection. He is already

civilised: he awaits merely the idiosyncracy of the particular

civilisation.

---

A civilisation is the attempted working out of a Scheme of Salvation: a

plan of escape. It is the imperfect form built up from the perfected

plan which the religious philosophies of the "great" "constructive"

"thinkers" of its age have projected. For it is not merely that a race

of men bleached white with the failure of courage would do well with a

prelaid scheme of action: they refuse to move on without one. They bleat

for a Deliverer—a great constructive thinker—as sheep for a shepherd.

Being without prescience, without inner compelling desire, they wait to

be told. The great world of audiences puts out its distracted agitated

tentacles, swaying about aimlessly, dumb appeals to be told how to

expend themselves, and where. Culture, training in the art of spending

oneself, is the imperious necessity of the bleached race, whether

lettered or simple. Life without the courage for it, is so bad a

business that they must needs approach it with caution. Earth is so

little to their taste that they demand the construction of a heaven. To

construct the "New Jerusalem," work to the plan of the Deliverer, and

make a heaven on earth is a task they can put their hands to. But to

live for themselves—to lose "faith"? They would as soon not live at all.

So the heads steam with fresh purpose, and the thought-wreaths mount

apace: until there is enough and to spare to build Heavens without end,

Hells to match and Attacking and Delivering Hosts of Thoughts to storm

and defend. What the battalions shall be named and how they shall be

drawn up is nobody's concern save that of the "constructive" thinker who

outlines the vaporous sketch. He maps out a bold skyscape in smoke, and

the civilised group themselves under whatever concept taste or

convenience dictates. They follow out the scheme as a whole as they

would the colour-scheme and revelries on the floor of some great hall in

imitation of its painted ceiling. So are they safe: linked up with

heaven. If their earthly concerns get neglected and somewhat mixed on

account of conducting their affairs on a pattern pertaining strictly to

a heaven of thought who is to say they would not have been more

hopelessly confused had their turned their feeble temper upon them: and

whatever befalls, have they not Faith—in Heaven? And does not their

bemusedness give the earthly sort their chance to use them, for what

they are worth?

---

It is the flexibility with apparently unlimited power to make

adjustments according to order in human nature which the Thought-weavers

work upon when rigging out their canvases. Human nature can be accorded

a summary treatment quite other from that which is given to inert

matter. If the Thames flows east and the Severn west "thinkers" will

acknowledge and respect the stubborn tendency; but human nature must set

itself to all the points of the compass if the Plan of Salvation demands

it. As it can if it works to it with Goodwill. The Goodwill can in fact

accomplish all things. It is therefore the base of every "constructive"

scheme of thought. It is the one factor indeed which makes them

thinkable. That is why it is so extolled. What system is there which

does not give the palm to the Goodwill: the set intention to work to

pattern. If the weavers of shadows can count on this set intention, it

is enough. The result they can safely leave to the slow wearing down of

habit and constant repetition. In time, with Goodwill, the "plan" will

be plotted out in conduct as quantities are on squared paper to give a

curve. This "plan" plotted out by Goodwill into conduct will similarly

"reveal itself in our lives." The plans differ, and the "curves" of

civilisations differ in consequence, but Goodwill is the same in them

all. It is the amenable teachable will: the fluttering tentacle, beating

about uncertainly, charged with energy but without direction. It stands

for the intention to follow if only directions are given to it—if the

canvas is stretched across its sky.

The humanitarian skyscape under which we walk nowadays and which we are

all expected to be "revealing in our lives" is the residue of rubbish

left over after the Revolution had enabled what there was in it of

egoistic temper to obtain the desired spoil under exceptionally

favourable circumstances. This vapourous design is the maleficent legacy

which has been bequeathed to succeeding centuries after the French

bourgeoisie had acquired the sole benefits of the insurrection. The

legatees have done handsomely by it, spreading it out and patching it up

like old property, until now it is both neat and compact. It could be

sketched out on half a sheet of notepaper and leave plenty of available

space.

---

It demands first of course the Goodwill which is taken for granted but

encouraged in well-doing by an apothesis of a sort. Goodwill is so

essential that the fluttering little tentacle is elevated to the rank of

the sacred, and as fraternity takes its place in the humanitarian

Olympus. In the deification ceremony Godwill unequivocally asserts its

intentions, and proves itself so completely at the service of the Scheme

of Things and above the level of suspicion, by divorcing itself

completely from its own selfish interests, cutting itself off at the

very outset from the Plan's only serious rival, the natural bent of the

Self. As the hymn puts it, it plumps for "None of Self and all of—the

Plan." (There is no form of literature so profoundly informing as a

hymn-book.) The ceremony is the formal abandonment of the Self-will by

which Goodwill becomes Goodwill in earnest as Fraternity, in which rôle

it will reappear later in the sketch as the divine parent of Humanity.

From this point all is plain sailing. To love one's neighbour as

oneself: to love the Public Good, i.e., all one's neighbours put

together, better than ourselves: that is the fruitful spirit in which is

begotten the "more than Brotherhood," the Oneness of Humanity and the

Race, when we shall "all one body be." Then shall each little one be as

a limb to the great body, each well-pleased that he pleases not himself

but serves the Whole. The design grows. Dimension has entered into it,

and with it a greater and a less: a standard of measurement therefore

and a seat of authority: a scale of values which indicates automatically

when a "member" offends. If the smaller frets the greater: perish the

smaller or let it amend its ways. What is the greater? What can it be

but Humanity, the Type, the generalisation, the thing with capitals,

high conception and lofty thought. How the heads steam, and thoughts

mount—rise to the "All," the "each and every" pounded out of recognition

into sameness, bound together by the fraternal cement into—Man: the

master-achievement to accomplish which we sink our mean differences and

forget our inequalities. Has not each become equal in willingness to

serve—Man. Equal then, we are: with equal "rights" to protection of our

"freedom" to perform our "duties" towards—Man; receiving equal dues from

a blindfolded "Justice" with even scales. The tableau grows complete:

Goodwill: Fraternity: Humanity: Peace: Order: Law: Rights: Justice:

Liberty: Man—the Humanitarian Heaven, so balanced and symmetrical that

it requires an unregarding egoism to break into it. Unfortunately for

the picture's stability, the power of Goodwill is not equal to its

intentions. It is like the God of Arnold's Empedocles who "would do all

things well, but some times fails in strength." When it abandons

self-will to enter the empyrean of the gods, it docs not annihilate it,

and the "obtuse unreason of the she-intelligence" which is the temper of

men whose intelligence has had strength to resist the torturings of

intellectual feebleness, breaks regardless into the pretty thought tight

systems, only to leave them lying in the path of history broken and awry

like shattered mechanical toys. The spikes and burrs on the garment of

the selfish man rip into the gossamer thought meshes which stretch like

cobwebs across the field of action. It is the selfish man who reduces

all the systems to inoperation: who is the despair of the "constructive"

thinkers. The power to annul any and every thought-system is founded in

the absence of Goodwill. The streak of self-determination cuts the

selfish man off from the well-intentioned from the outset. Unless the

docile temper is available to work it on to the warp of reality, the

"Plan" is futile. Its beginning and end rest on the Goodwill, which will

plod along like an industrious mole to "realise" the "philosophic"

scheme fashionable to its day and generation. Temper, which is energy

self-conscious of its direction, has plans and insight of its own: it is

not amenable to direction, or to moral suasion. Instead of an intention

to serve Man, its intention is to serve itself and its own soul as suits

itself: it has no "standard" save its own satisfaction. It saves its

soul alive by respecting it; by preventing it from being merged with

blunted characteristics into anything else—the whole or anything other.

It holds by the instinct that emergence from the herd is the proof

positive that it is not of the herd; that to be conscious of its

emergence is its distinction and master achievement, and to maintain and

accentuate it is its supreme business; to make it more and more of its

"own" kind, unique; to weed out that which is alien to itself; to be

"sincere" through and through; to free itself from all elements

non-selfish: this is the work to which it finds it has a natural bent,

and by it, it makes itself impregnable; incapable of being broken into

or broken down. It is the instinct for its own permanence, its

immortality may be, which, without regard, eats up or casts out every

particle of Goodwill. Hence the futility for all save the herd, of all

schemes of salvation based on Goodwill, and the value which temper sets

upon its antagonisms equally with its attractions. The one is as

essential as the other for that light and shade in which individual

differentiation finds itself clear. To be incapable of being repelled by

any of the brethren is at least as much death in life as to be incapable

of being attracted. Antagonism, not for what is bad for the fancy

picture—the community and the race—but for that which repels the

something within oneself, independent of its relation to the scheme of

values, is as valuable—more exciting if not as comfortable—as

attraction. Oh universal brotherhood, universal love, sameness,

monotony, extinction! Mankind pressing onward to Unity, swept forward as

by one impulse to the bosom of the Type! Like those swine which it says

somewhere, were swept into the Gadarene Sea!

---

Happily the nightmare lives mainly only in the picture: in reality,

individuals pair off in two and threes or scrap among themselves.

Universal brotherhood is mainly subscribed to by people very capable of

giving the salutary cut to the simple brother foolish enough to assume

that they mean it. The fact which misleads, and encourages the notion

that Goodwill is more than a thought-mist for any not of the herd is the

extension of the imaginative area by the wide sweep of the senses,

whereby things which one sees, hears or hears of, become part of the

mental landscape; and as such are subjected to efforts which would

change them to our liking. One makes effort to remove unsightly features

which disaffect us in those about us from a motive like that which would

impel us to remove an unsightly structure which faced one's window. Not

for the sake of the structure, but for the sake of our personal comfort.

But with more than that no one has truck with. Any thing beyond that

must be left to be indicated on the "Plan": as n is left to indicate the

power of a number increased to infinity.

With the breaking of the thread of Goodwill, the humanitarian philosophy

would unravel at a single pull, like a chain-stitched seam would if the

right thread were seized. Humanity is robbed of its "principle" and

dissolves soulless when egoists break in upon fraternity. It falls apart

into its component individuals like the sand from mortar, if the

cohering lime were removed. Its "progress," become the progress of a

non-entity, vanishes and with it the source of authority which in its

name advised and admonished individuals. What "progress" there may be,

becomes a progression in the individuals themselves, which follows

individual laws, each being a law to himself. Authority gone,

"protection" goes, and "rights" go with it. There are no rights without

protection. Anything of "rights" which is not might is "bestowed,"

"permitted," and only with the protection of Authority can there be

adequate bestowal and permission. Authority shattered, the only right is

might—right to what one can get, that is: one's just dues. The easy

assumption that one has a right to anything, livelihood, "equitable

returns," comfort, liberty, or life itself shrink like phantoms in

daylight. When Goodwill is gone rights can be had for the commanding—for

the power to enforce them—and no cheaper.

Liberty too is impossible without protection. Liberty is nine parts

coercion, and the coercion of the weak,—the only ones who make appeal

for liberty—is exercised through authority. Liberty, the plaint of the

feeble, is the "assumption" that the strong must stay the strength of

their arm: if they refuse, authority must compel them. Of course

authority and the powerful run together, as like to like; but that does

not enlighten the libertarians. They still appeal that the right hand

shall shackle the left: it is their trustfulness.

The tenth part of liberty is the claim to be "free." All claims are

easy, but the claim to be tree is easy of enforcement: which not all

claims are. By the simple process of abandonment, one can be free of

most things. Relatively very few persons are held captive in prisons or

beleaguered cities. Most can have as much freedom as they want: the

truth is that they do not want it. Freedom even as a concept is

negative, and the things one truly wants are positive. People are not

greatly agitated by that which they desire to be rid of; it is the

desire to have possession which makes their problem, and those who call

out for freedom desire, not freedom, but property, and property is won

and held only in virtue of the possession of power. The plaintive

appeals of those who say they want liberty but who mean that they want

to be presented with property and to be supported in its possession can

be met only when the pathetic pleaders decide to increase their power to

get and hold; or to support in power a strong authority to which they

can make appeal for appropriation and protection; or to persuade the

powerful already in possession to a voluntary act of grace towards the

weak and non-possessing.

The second method has been tried, is being and is likely to be for some

time to come; the third is the method which by common consent of all

orators and clergy sounds the best: on all occasions sacred or profane:

it is the method firmly believed in by all the feeble and none of the

strong. It is the millenium arrived at by way of Liberty, Love and

Humanity. The first is the one the poor in spirit and pocket have no

heart for; it has no friends; it dismays the rich as much as it sickens

the poor, and in the long interval which is likely to elapse before it

is put on its trial, the ravelling thread of the humanitarian canvas

will be caught up and the array of vaporous combatants in the army of

Humanity, the entire assemblage of the Delivering Hosts of Thought will

wreathe themselves out like a painted battle until the real flesh and

blood combat is ready to begin. The poor will continue to lay claim to

rights—to look for the advent of a liberty they can never see; they will

"claim" an equality with those with whom they are not equal; claim the

"justice" which assumes a non-existing equality: a justice which is not

just. And as they assume their possession of "rights" in these claims,

they will-being in truth a humble and indoctrinated people—assume the

duties to correspond, and perform the services. Their services will be

accepted: the claims rejected. The quid pro quo they will obtain will be

a clear title to the virtues, the reward for which is laid up in Heaven,

high and away behind the Sky-scape and the stout form of Humanity.

Of the property which they want when they ask for liberty—not one jot.

To get that they would require to seize and thieve, and thieving is not

prescribed on the Sky-scape. Nor is it compatible with virtue when

exercised on a humble scale, and who can hope they will ever rob on the

noble one, generously and like gentlemen? If one of them were caught

red-handed, he would be found to be smuggling away a can of milk: which

is hopeless as thieving. Scarcely in our time will they need to take in

and pack away the humanitarian canvas—unless indeed there is force and a

sting in irony.