💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › voltairine-de-cleyre-the-dominant-idea.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:36:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Dominant Idea Author: Voltairine de Cleyre Date: 1910 Language: en Topics: history Source: Retrieved on March 24th, 2009 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/cleyre/dominant.html Notes: Mother Earth Publishing Association. 210 East 18th Street. New York. 1910.
On everything that lives, if one looks searchingly, is limned the shadow
line of an idea — an idea, dead or living, sometimes stronger when dead,
with rigid, unswerving lines that mark the living embodiment with the
stern immobile cast of the non-living. Daily we move among these
unyielding shadows, less pierceable, more enduring than granite, with
the blackness of ages in them, dominating living, changing bodies, with
dead, unchanging souls. And we meet, also, living souls dominating dying
bodies — living ideas regnant over decay and death. Do not imagine that
I speak of human life alone. The stamp of persistent or of shifting Will
is visible in the grass-blade rooted in its clod of earth, as in the
gossamer web of being that floats and swims far over our heads in the
free world of air.
Regnant ideas, everywhere! Did you ever see a dead vine bloom? I have
seen it. Last summer I trained some morning-glory vines up over a
second-story balcony; and every day they blew and curled in the wind,
their white, purple-dashed faces winking at the sun, radiant with
climbing life. Higher every day the green heads crept, carrying their
train of spreading fans waving before the sun-seeking blossoms. Then all
at once some mischance happened, — some cut worm or some mischievous
child tore one vine off below, the finest and most ambitious one, of
course. In a few hours the leaves hung limp, the sappy stem wilted and
began to wither; in a day it was dead, — all but the top, which still
clung longingly to its support, with bright head lifted. I mourned a
little for the buds that could never open now, and tied that proud vine
whose work in the world was lost. But the next night there was a storm,
a heavy, driving storm, with beating rain and blinding lightning. I rose
to watch the flashes, and lo! the wonder of the world! In the blackness
of the mid-NIGHT, in the fury of wind and rain, the dead vine had
flowered. Five white, moon-faced blossoms blew gaily round the skeleton
vine, shining back triumphant at the red lightning. I gazed at them in
dumb wonder. Dear, dead vine, whose will had been so strong to bloom,
that in the hour of its sudden cut-off from the feeding earth, it sent
the last sap to its blossoms; and, not waiting for the morning, brought
them forth in storm and flash, as white night-glories, which should have
been the children of the sun.
In the daylight we all came to look at the wonder, marveling much, and
saying, “Surely these must be the last.” But every day for three days
the dead vine bloomed; and even a week after, when every leaf was dry
and brown, and so thin you could see through it, one last bud, dwarfed,
weak, a very baby of a blossom, but still white and delicate, with five
purple flecks, like those on the live vine beside it, opened and waved
at the stars, and waited for the early sun. Over death and decay the
Dominant Idea smiled: the vine was in the world to bloom, to bear white
trumpet blossoms dashed with purple; and it held its will beyond death.
Our modern teaching is, that ideas are but attendant phenomena, impotent
to determine the actions or relations of life, as the image in the glass
which should say to the body it reflects: “I shall shape thee.” In truth
we know that directly the body goes from before the mirror, the
transient image is nothingness; but the real body has its being to live,
and will live it, heedless of vanished phantoms of itself, in response
to the ever-shifting pressure of things without it.
It is thus that the so-called Materialist Conception of History, the
modern Socialists, and a positive majority of Anarchists would have us
look upon the world of ideas, — shifting, unreal reflections, having
naught to do in the determination of Man’s life, but so many mirror
appearances of certain material relations, wholly powerless to act upon
the course of material things. Mind to them is in itself a blank mirror,
though in fact never wholly blank, because always facing the reality of
the material and bound to reflect some shadow. To-day I am somebody,
to-morrow somebody else, if the scenes have shifted; my Ego is a
gibbering phantom, pirouetting in the glass, gesticulating,
transforming, hourly or momentarily, gleaming with the phosphor light of
a deceptive unreality, melting like the mist upon the hills. Rocks,
fields, woods, streams, houses, goods, flesh, blood, bone, sinew, —
these are realities, with definite parts to play, with essential
characters that abide under all changes; but my Ego does not abide; it
is manufactured afresh with every change of these.
I think this unqualified determinism of the material is a great and
lamentable error in our modern progressive movement; and while I believe
it was a wholesome antidote to the long-continued blunder of Middle Age
theology, viz., that Mind was an utterly irresponsible entity making
laws of its own after the manner of an Absolute Emperor, without logic,
sequence, or relation, ruler over matter, and its own supreme
determinant, not excepting God (who was himself the same sort of a mind
writ large) — while I do believe that the modern re-conception of
Materialism has done a wholesome thing in pricking the bubble of such
conceit and restoring man and his “soul” to its “place in nature,” I
nevertheless believe that to this also there is a limit; and that the
absolute sway of Matter is quite as mischievous an error as the
unrelated nature of Mind; even that in its direct action upon personal
conduct, it has the more ill effect of the two. For if the doctrine of
free-will has raised up fanatics and persecutors, who, assuming that men
may be good under all conditions if they merely wish to be so, have
sought to persuade other men’s wills with threats, fines, imprisonments,
torture, the spike, the wheel, the axe, the fagot, in order to make them
good and save them against their obdurate wills; if the doctrine of
Spiritualism, the soul supreme, has done this, the doctrine of
Materialistic Determinism has produced shifting, self-excusing,
worthless, parasitical characters, who are this now and that at some
other time, and anything and nothing upon principle. “My conditions have
made me so,” they cry, and there is no more to be said; poor
mirror-ghosts! how could they help it! To be sure, the influence of such
a character rarely reaches so far as that of the principled persecutor;
but for every one of the latter, there are a hundred of these easy,
doughy characters, who will fit any baking tin, to whom determinist
self-excusing appeals; so the balance of evil between the two doctrines
is about maintained.
What we need is a true appraisement of the power and rĂ´le of the Idea. I
do not think I am able to give such a true appraisement, I do not think
that any one — even much greater intellects than mine — will be able to
do it for a long time to come. But I am at least able to suggest it, to
show its necessity, to give a rude approximation of it.
And first, against the accepted formula of modern Materialism, “Men are
what circumstances make them,” I set the opposing declaration,
“Circumstances are what men make them”; and I contend that both these
things are true up to the point where the combating powers are
equalized, or one is overthrown. In other words, my conception of mind,
or character, is not that it is a powerless reflection of a momentary
condition of stuff and form, but an active modifying agent, reacting on
its environment and transforming circumstances, sometimes slightly,
sometimes greatly, sometimes, though not often, entirely.
All over the kingdom of life, I have said, one may see dominant ideas
working, if one but trains his eyes to look for them and recognize them.
In the human world there have been many dominant ideas. I cannot
conceive that ever, at any time, the struggle of the body before
dissolution can have been aught but agony. If the reasoning that
insecurity of conditions, the expectation of suffering, are
circumstances which make the soul of man uneasy, shrinking, timid, what
answer will you give to the challenge of old Ragnar Lodbrog, to that
triumphant death-song hurled out, not by one cast to his death in the
heat of battle, but under slow prison torture, bitten by serpents, and
yet singing: “The goddesses of death invite me away — now end I my song.
The hours of my life are run out. I shall smile when I die”? Nor can it
be said that this is an exceptional instance, not to be accounted for by
the usual operation of general law, for old King Lodbrog the Skalder did
only what his fathers did, and his sons and his friends and his enemies,
through long generations; they set the force of a dominant idea, the
idea of the super ascendant ego, against the force of torture and of
death, ending life as they wished to end it, with a smile on their lips.
But a few years ago, did we not read how the helpless Kaffirs,
victimized by the English for the contumacy of the Boers, having been
forced to dig the trenches wherein for pleasant sport they were to be
shot, were lined up on the edge, and seeing death facing them, began to
chant barbaric strains of triumph, smiling as they fell? Let us admit
that such exultant defiance was owing to ignorance, to primitive beliefs
in gods and hereafters; but let us admit also that it shows the power of
an idea dominant.
Everywhere in the shells of dead societies, as in the shells of the
sea-slime, we shall see the force of purposive action, of intent within
holding its purpose against obstacles without.
I think there is no one in the world who can look upon the steadfast,
far-staring face of an Egyptian carving, or read a description of
Egypt’s monuments, or gaze upon the mummied clay of its old dead men,
without feeling that the dominant idea of that people in that age was to
be enduring and to work enduring things, with the immobility of their
great still sky upon them and the stare of the desert in them. One must
feel that whatever other ideas animated them, and expressed themselves
in their lives, this was the dominant idea. That which was must remain,
no matter at what cost, even if it were to break the ever-lasting hills:
an idea which made the live humanity beneath it, born and nurtured in
the corns of caste, groan and writhe and gnaw its bandages, till in the
fullness of time it passed away: and still the granite mould of it
stares with empty eyes out across the world, the stern old memory of the
Thing-that-was.
I think no one can look upon the marbles wherein Greek genius wrought
the figuring of its soul without feeling an apprehension that the things
are going to leap and fly; that in a moment one is like to be set upon
by heroes with spears in their hands, by serpents that will coil around
him; to be trodden by horses that may trample and flee; to be smitten by
these gods that have as little of the idea of stone in them as a
dragon-fly, one instant poised upon a wind-swayed petal edge. I think no
one can look upon them without realizing at once that those figures came
out of the boil of life; they seem like rising bubbles about to float
into the air, but beneath them other bubbles rising, and others, and
others, — there will be no end of it. When one’s eyes are upon one
group, one feels that behind one, perhaps, a figure is tiptoeing to
seize the darts of the air and hurl them on one’s head; one must keep
whirling to face the miracle that appears about to be wrought — stone
leaping! And this though nearly every one is minus some of the glory the
old Greek wrought into it so long ago; even the broken stumps of arms
and legs live. And the dominant idea is Activity, and the beauty and
strength of it. Change, swift, ever-circling Change! The making of
things and the casting of them away, as children cast away their toys,
not interested that these shall endure, so that they themselves realize
incessant activity. Full of creative power what matter if the creature
perished. So there was an endless procession of changing shapes in their
schools, their philosophies their dramas, their poems, till at last it
wore itself to death. And the marvel passed away from the world. But
still their marbles live to show what manner of thoughts dominated them.
And if we wish to, know what master-thought ruled the lives of men when
the mediæval period had had time to ripen it, one has only at this day
to stray into some quaint, out-of-the-way English village, where a
strong old towered Church yet stands in the midst of little
straw-thatched cottages, like a brooding mother-hen surrounded by her
chickens. Everywhere the greatening of God and the lessening of Man: the
Church so looming, the home so little. The search for the spirit, for
the enduring thing (not the poor endurance of granite which in the ages
crumbles, but the eternal), the eternal, — and contempt for the body
which perishes, manifest in studied uncleanliness, in mortifications of
the flesh, as if the spirit should have spat its scorn upon it.
Such was the dominant idea of that middle age which has been too much
cursed by modernists. For the men who built the castles and the
cathedrals, were men of mighty works, though they made no books, and
though their souls spread crippled wings, because of their very
endeavors to soar too high. The spirit of voluntary subordination for
the accomplishment of a great work, which proclaimed the aspiration of
the common soul, — that was the spirit wrought into the cathedral
stones; and it is not wholly to be condemned.
In waking dream, when the shadow-shapes of world-ideas swim before the
vision, one sees the Middle-Age Soul an ill-contorted, half-formless
thing, with dragon wings and a great, dark, tense face, strained sunward
with blind eyes.
If now we look around us to see what idea dominates our own
civilization, I do not know that it is even as attractive as this
piteous monster of the old darkness. The relativity of things has
altered: Man has risen and God bas descended. The modern village has
better homes and less pretentious churches. Also, the conception of dirt
and disease as much-sought afflictions, the patient suffering of which
is a meet offering to win God’s pardon, has given place to the emphatic
promulgation of cleanliness. We have Public School nurses notifying
parents that “pediculosis capitis” is a very contagious and unpleasant
disease; we have cancer associations gathering up such cancers as have
attached themselves to impecunious persons, and carefully experimenting
with a view to cleaning them out of the human race; we have tuberculosis
societies attempting the Herculean labor of clearing the Aegean stables
of our modern factories of the deadly bacillus, and they have got as far
as spittoons with water in them in some factories; and others, and
others, and others, which while not yet overwhelmingly successful in
their avowed purposes are evidence sufficient that humanity no longer
seeks dirt as a means of grace. We laugh at those old superstitions and
talk much about exact experimental knowledge. We endeavor to galvanize
the Greek corpse, and pretend that we enjoy physical culture. We dabble
in many things; but the one great real idea of our age, not copied from
any other, not pretended, not raised to life by any conjuration, is the
Much Making of Things, — not the making of beautiful things, not the joy
of spending living energy in creative work; rather the shameless,
merciless driving and over-driving, wasting and draining of the last lit
of energy, only to produce heaps and heaps of things, — things ugly,
things harmful, things useless, and at the best largely unnecessary. To
what end are they produced? Mostly the producer does not know; still
less does he care. But he is possessed with the idea that he must do it,
every one is doing it, and every year the making of things goes on more
and faster; there are mountain ranges of things made and making, and
still men go about desperately seeking to increase the list of created
things, to start fresh heaps and to add to the existing heaps. And with
what agony of body, under what stress and strain of danger and fear of
danger, with what mutilations and maimings and lamings they struggle on,
dashing themselves out against these rocks of wealth! Verily, if the
vision of the Mediæval Soul is painful in its blind staring and pathetic
striving, grotesque in its senseless tortures, the Soul of the Modern is
most amazing with its restless, nervous eyes, ever searching the corners
of the universe, its restless, nervous hands ever reaching and grasping
for some useless toil.
And certainly the presence of things in abundance, things empty and
things vulgar and things absurd, as well as things convenient and
useful, has produced the desire for the possession of things, the
exaltation of the possession of things. Go through the business street
of any city, where the tilted edges of the strata of things are exposed
to gaze, and look at the faces of the people as they pass, — not at the
hungry and smitten ones who fringe the sidewalks and plain dolefully for
alms, but at the crowd, — and see what idea is written on their faces.
On those of the women, from the ladies of the horse-shows to the shop
girls out of the factory, there is a sickening vanity, a consciousness
of their clothes, as of some jackdaw in borrowed feathers. Look for the
pride and glory of the free, strong, beautiful body, lithe-moving and
powerful. You will not see it. You will see mincing steps, bodies tilted
to show the cut of a skirt, simpering, smirking faces, with eyes cast
about seeking admiration for the gigantic bow of ribbon in the
overdressed hair. In the caustic words of an acquaintance, to whom I
once said, as we walked, “Look at the amount of vanity on all these
women’s faces,” “No: look at the little bit of womanhood showing out of
all that vanity!”
And on the faces of the men, coarseness! Coarse desires for coarse
things, and lots of them: the stamp is set so unmistakably that “the
wayfarer though a fool need not err therein.” Even the frightful anxiety
and restlessness begotten of the creation of all this, is less
distasteful than the abominable expression of lust for the things
created.
Such is the dominant idea of the western world, at least in these our
days. You may see it wherever you look, impressed plainly on things and
on men; very like if you look in the glass, you will see it there. And
if some archaeologist of a long future shall some day unbury the bones
of our civilization, where ashes or flood shall have entombed it, he
will see this frightful idea stamped on the factory walls he shall
uncover, with their rows and rows of square light-holes, their tons upon
tons of toothed steel, grinning out of the skull of this our life; its
acres of silk and velvet, its square miles of tinsel and shoddy. No
glorious marbles of nymphs and fawns, whose dead images are yet so sweet
that one might wish to kiss them still; no majestic figures of winged
horses, with men’s faces and lions’ paws casting their colossal
symbolism in a mighty spell forward upon Time, as those old stone
chimeras of Babylon yet do; but meaningless iron giants, of wheels and
teeth, whose secret is forgotten, but whose business was to grind men
tip, and spit them out as housefuls of woven stuffs, bazaars of trash,
wherethrough other men might wade. The statues he shall find will bear
no trace of mythic dream or mystic symbol; they will be statues of
merchants and ironmasters and militia-men, in tailored coats and
pantaloons and proper hats and shoes.
But the dominant idea of the age and land does not necessarily mean the
dominant idea of any single life. I doubt not that in those long gone
days, far away by the banks of the still Nile, in the abiding shadow of
the pyramids, under the heavy burden of other men’s stolidity, there
went to and fro restless, active, rebel souls who hated all that the
ancient society stood for, and with burning hearts sought to overthrow
it.
I am sure that in the midst of all the agile Greek intellect created,
there were those who went about with downbent eyes, caring nothing for
it all, seeking some higher revelation, willing to abandon the joys of
life, so that they drew near to some distant, unknown perfection their
fellows knew not of. I am certain that in the dark ages, when most men
prayed and cowered, and beat and bruised themselves, and sought
afflictions, like that St. Teresa who still, “Let me suffer, or die,”
there were some, many, who looked on the world as a chance jest, who
despised or pitied their ignorant comrades, and tried to compel the
answers of the universe to their questionings, by the patient, quiet
searching which came to be Modern Science. I am sure there were hundreds
thousands of them, of whom we have never heard.
And now, to-day, though the Society about us is dominated by
Thing-Worship, and will stand so marked for all time, that is no reason
any single soul should be. Because the one thing seemingly worth doing
to my neighbor, to all my neighbors, is to pursue dollars, that is no
reason I should pursue dollars. Because my neighbors conceive they need
an inordinate heap of carpets, furniture, clocks, china, glass,
tapestries, mirrors, clothes, jewels and servants to care for them, and
detectives to, keep an eye on the servants, judges to try the thieves,
and politicians to appoint the judges, jails to punish the culprits, and
wardens to watch in the jails, and tax collectors to gather support for
the wardens, and fees for the tax collectors, and strong houses to hold
the fees, so that none but the guardians thereof can make off with them,
— and therefore, to keep this host of parasites, need other men to work
for them, and make the fees; because my neighbors want all this, is that
any reason I should devote myself to such abarren folly? and bow my neck
to serve to keep up the gaudy show?
Must we, because the Middle Age was dark and blind and brutal, throw
away the one good thing it wrought into the fibre of Man, that the
inside of a human being was worth more than the outside? that to
conceive a higher thing than oneself and live toward that is the only
way of living worthily? The goal strived for should, and must, be a very
different one from that which led the mediæval fanatics to despise the
body and belabor it with hourly crucifixions. But one can recognize the
claims and the importance of the body without therefore sacrificing
truth, honor, simplicity, and faith, to the vulgar gauds of
body-service, whose very decorations debase the thing they might be
supposed to exalt.
I have said before that the doctrine that men are nothing and
circumstances all, has been, and is, the bane of our modern social
reform movements.
Our youth, themselves animated by the spirit of the old teachers who
believed in the supremacy of ideas, even in the very hour of throwing
away that teaching, look with burning eyes to the social East, and
believe that wonders of revolution are soon to be accomplished. In their
enthusiasm they foreread the gospel of Circumstances to mean that very
soon the pressure of material development must break down the social
system — they give the rotten thing but a few years to last; and then,
they themselves shall witness the transformation, partake in its joys.
The few years pass away and nothing happens; enthusiasm cools. Behold
these same idealists then, successful business men, professionals,
property owners, money leaders, creeping into the social ranks they once
despised, pitifully, contemptibly, at the skirts of some impecunious
personage to whom they have lent money, or done some professional
service gratis; behold them lying, cheating, tricking, flattering,
buying and selling themselves for any frippery, any cheap little
pretense. The Dominant Social Idea has seized them, their lives are
swallowed up in it; and when you ask the reason why, they tell you that
Circumstances compelled them so to do. If you quote their lies to them,
they smile with calm complacency, assure you that when Circumstances
demand lies, lies are a great deal better than truth; that tricks are
sometimes more effective than honest dealing; that flattering and duping
do not matter, if the end to be attained is desirable; and that under
existing “Circumstances” life isn’t possible without all this; that it
is going to be possible whenever Circumstances have made truth-telling
easier than lying, but till then a man must look out for himself, by all
means. And so the cancer goes on rotting away the moral fibre, and the
man becomes a lump, a squash, a piece of slippery slime taking all
shapes and losing all shapes, according to what particular hole or
corner he wishes to glide into, — a disgusting embodiment of the moral
bankruptcy begotten by Thing-Worship.
Had he been dominated by a less material conception of life, had his
will not been rotted by the intellectual reasoning of it out of its
existence, by its acceptance of its own nothingness, the unselfish
aspirations of his earlier years would have grown and strengthened by
exercise and habit; and his protest against the time might have been
enduringly written, and to some purpose.
Will it be said that the Pilgrim fathers did not hew, out of the New
England ice and granite, the idea which gathered them together out of
their scattered and obscure English villages, and drove them in their
frail ships aver the Atlantic in midwinter, to cut their way against all
opposing forces? Were they not common men, subject to the operation of
common law? Will it be said that Circumstances aided them? When death,
disease, hunger, and cold had done their worst, not one of those
remaining was willing by an easy lie to return to material comfort and
the possibility of long days.
Had our modern social revolutionists the vigorous and undaunted
conception of their own powers that these had, our social movements
would not be such pitiful abortions, — core-rotten even before the
outward flecks appear.
“Give a labor leader a political job, and the system becomes all right,”
laugh our enemies; and they point mockingly to Terence Powderly acid his
like; and they quote John Burns, who as soon as he went into Parliament
declared: “The time of the agitator is past; the time of the legislator
has come.” “Let an Anarchist marry an heiress, and the country is safe,”
they sneer: — and they have the right to sneer. But would they have that
right, could they have it, if our lives were not in the first instance
dominated by more insistent desires than those we would fain have others
think we hold most dear?
It is the old story: “Aim at the stars, and you may hit the top of the
gatepost; but aim at the ground, and you will hit the ground.”
It is not to be supposed that any one will attain to the full
realization of what he purposes, even when those purposes do not involve
united action with others; he will fall short; he will in some measure
be overcome by contending or inert opposition. But something he will
attain, if he continues to aim high.
What, then, would I have? you ask. I would have men invest themselves
with the dignity of an aim higher than the chase for wealth; choose a
thing to do in life outside of the making of things, and keep it in
mind, — not for a day, nor a year, but for a life-time. And then keep
faith with themselves! Not be a light-o’-love, to-day professing this
and to-morrow that, and easily reading oneself out of both whenever it
becomes convenient; not advocating a thing to-day and to-morrow kissing
its enemies’ sleeve, with that weak, coward cry in the mouth,
“Circumstances make me.” Take a good look into yourself, and if you love
Things and the power and the plenitude of Things better than you love
your own dignity, human dignity, Oh, say so, say so! Say it to yourself,
and abide by it. But do not blow hot and cold in one breath. Do not try
to be a social reformer and a respected possessor of Things at the same
time. Do not preach the straight and narrow way while going joyously
upon the wide one. Preach the wide one, or do not preach at all; but do
not fool yourself by saying you would like to help usher in a free
society, but you cannot sacrifice an armchair for it. Say honestly, “I
love arm-chairs better than free men, and pursue them because I choose;
not because circumstances make me. I love hats, large, large hats, with
many feathers and great bows; and I would rather have those hats than
trouble myself about social dreams that will never be accomplished in my
day. The world worships hats, and I wish to worship with them.”
But if you choose the liberty and pride and strength of the single soul,
and the free fraternization of men, as the purpose which your life is to
make manifest then do not sell it for tinsel. Think that your soul is
strong and will hold its way; and slowly, through bitter struggle
perhaps the strength will grow. And the foregoing of possessions for
which others barter the last possibility of freedom will become easy.
At the end of life you may close your eyes saying: “I have not been
dominated by the Dominant Idea of my Age; I have chosen mine own
allegiance, and served it. I have proved by a lifetime that there is
that in man which saves him from the absolute tyranny of Circumstance,
which in the end conquers and remoulds Circumstance, the immortal fire
of Individual Will, which is the salvation of the Future.”
Let us have Men, Men who will say a word to their souls and keep it —
keep it not when it is easy, but keep it when it is hard — keep it when
the storm roars and there is a white-streaked sky and blue thunder
before, and one’s eyes are blinded and one’s ears deafened with the war
of opposing things; and keep it under the long leaden sky and the gray
dreariness that never lifts. Hold unto the last: that is what it means
to have a Dominant Idea, which Circumstance cannot break. And such men
make and unmake Circumstance.