Love in 5000 Years Page 12

  Secondly, the citizens of those Epochs appeared to have a particular appetite for what they called Power—which is to say, the domination and molestation of others. The person who only enslaved one other to carry out the base tasks of life for his profit was less reputed than one who enslaved thousands. Governing one’s peers, in multitudes or small groups, was, therefore, a delight much sought-after by the favored classes. There were kings, emperors, queens, politicians, popes, ministers, sorcerers, rabble-rousers and priests, whose function consisted of maintaining in subjection and bewilderment the people who requested their protection.

  Alongside them functioned the potentates of commerce, the despots of industry, the brigands of the banks and the tyrants of the mind, who collaborated in the same work of moral or material compression.

  All of them distorted their actions advantageously by means of hired writers, stifling fee speech, strangling perspicacious criticism, constraining to inanition the audacious individuals who dared to censure them. And none of them feared collective or individual vengeance, for they knew the words that tickle the ears of donkeys and crowds agreeably, and unstintingly paid off the orators who would have been able to penetrate the membrane of stupidity covering the eyes of the latter.

  Thirdly, a bizarre sentiment, an epidermal itch similar in all respects to those afflicting the three individuals under observation, seemed to have thrown males toward females and even to weld men together, as the document related to the Polyphemus of the Urinals implied.

  And Sagax congratulated himself for having taken the Past by the throat and stripping away its mystery, in order to recover undeniable traces of the pathological case that, until now, had defeated his genius. But what was the name of the breakdown that produced it, and with what mysterious objective was it exercised? That was what his etiological science could not yet formulate.

  It could certainly be cured; his example was here to prove it. Since he had been working passionately, the memory of Formosa’s body had haunted him less tenaciously. Easily enough, in sum, he had escaped the grip of the redoubtable disease that had surged victoriously from the rubble of the dead World.

  The expression “to be married,” which he had encountered several times in the course of his reading, could be translated as “to have acquired the legal right to couple in the manner of beasts”—but Sagax, already triumphant, was abruptly obliged to change his tune. His discovery was merely an antinomy. How had the humans of the twentieth century been able to copulate in the manner of inferior species, since they were neuter in kind, like the Perfected of the present day? That, the Grand Physiologist could not doubt. To say “Civilization” was to assume the complete subordination of Nature, and all humans demanded the condition of civilization. Thus, once again, he must be mistaken on that point, and he was now struggling in one of the numerous dungeons of ignorance that Destiny takes delight in hollowing out beneath the feet of the presumptuous.

  Chapter VIII

  That morning, the Creator of Humans had inflicted lethargy on his three patients. Struck by the irresistible will, the latter, suddenly beating the air into a paradoxical whipped cream with their arms, had then stiffened and fallen into a catalepsy, their muscles resonating under the interior vibration of their nerves, stretched like the strings of a harp. Lying on their beds of effluvia, they would remain thus for forty-two days, the lapse of time strictly necessary for their brains, struck with inertia, to allow the dementia to perish for want of psychic nourishment, to the applause of the assembled crowd.

  In great haste, Sagax came back in order to draw more from the store of documents. The dragnet of his fearful fingers, plunging at hazard, brought out a new item, and he felt a shock in his breast in consequence.

  His heart leapt, and immediately, leaning over his desk, his will moderated the surge of his blood, preventing his temples from beating too forcefully, in order not to distract the patient work of all his faculties with any vain noise. A marvel! He had just found a part of the Annals of Morosex, which extended as far as the year 2310. And as he deciphered the text, he tasted the purest of cerebral joys, delighting in an intellectual ecstasy that he had never savored before since he had emerged into the light.

  To begin with, the historian made allusion to a general conflagration that had shaken the whole of Europe in the year 1914, and had cracked the timbers of aged societies. All the nations involved in that unprecedented butchery had struck out recklessly, wounding one another mortally. After a frightful period of civil wars, in the lacerations of a bloody pregnancy, the Occident had given birth to a new order. Russia, with a quasi-Asiatic government, had been the first to undergo a proletarian Revolution.

  The Era of Collectivism, Morosex wrote, the Hegira of Mutual Aid, began around the year 1960. After having expelled their former rulers, each people sent delegates to the great Constituent that the United States of Europe were obliged to organize. All lines of demarcation, all customs tariffs, all hindrances to free human movement were immediately abolished, and all the civilized races—Saxons, Latins, Slavs—were invited to the fraternal communion.

  Each territory was divided into sectors of industry, commerce or agriculture, in conformity with its previous economic temperament. Syndicates were charged with regulating and administering their production and entering into cohesion with distant syndicates of the same kind. Every manufacturing center was connected to neighboring centers by means of regional Federations. In their turn, these groups of Ferderations, which gathered together the whole activity of a nation, were regulated by the Supreme Council, a unique brain, whose power was formidable and which held in its hands what no autocrat had ever possessed—the creative energy of a country, that is—which it could galvanize or abolish at will.

  French surplus production was bartered for surplus production elsewhere—that of Germany, Italy, England or Austria—and the colonies, held in common, furnished what the unique Metropolis lacked. A rate of exchange fixed at the beginning of every year by the Conference of Arbitrage established the international exchange value of each product. The profits, after the balancing of the inter-State accounts, were attributed in part to the credit of each Nation and in part to the collective Treasury. However, to obviate the accumulation of profits, which would not have taken long to create the hegemony of one people, the reserve funds could not be held for more than three years without having been employed for the amelioration of common well-being or equipment. When that interval elapsed, they became the property of the Great Confederate Republic of the Occident.

  Henceforth, the peoples no longer had budgets, but accounts of Credit and Debit of imports and exports, which only profited the masses. At the end of the exercise, when one Nation was in excess, it contributed 75% of that excess to the Federal Chest, the objective of which was to bring relief to any region in a state of temporary need.

  Thus, from the Urals to Cape Finistère, from the North Sea to the Adriatic, after having filled the darkness of forty centuries with the howls of their ferocity, the members of the Great Human Family now exchanged the products of the land and industry, living, reconciled, in a fraternal embrace that welled all hearts with a magnanimous effervescence of justice and pity.

  The Assembly of each people was in permanent session, and every six months, delegates met who sent forty of their number to the council of the United States of Europe. These institutions were wise, and the human beings raised up on that platform of happiness would have considered their future without anguish, if Nature had not routinely oozed a sweat of maleficence that human lips sometimes welcomed as a love-potion.

  Indulgent of their reciprocal weaknesses and enjoying the irresponsibility inherent in Assemblies, it came about that the delegates to the Grand Council of the United States of Europe, about four hundred in number, who, in reality, governed more than three hundred million free individuals, conceived a boundless pride in that fact. As each candidate seeking that ultimate honor had, in order to be elected, draw multitudes of cl
ients in his wake and consent to recantations identical to those of the past, which virtuous men found repulsive, the result was that few good people sat in the Supreme Senate of the Occident.

  Composed of career politicians, these Estates General soon reproduced all the flaw of the legislative Parliaments that had preceded them in the times of capitalist domination. They issued unchallengeable decrees regarding everyday labor and economic questions, unhesitating sacrificing the rights of minorities. Subterranean intrigues, clan rivalries and personal rivalries increasingly dishonored all of their sessions.

  There were some, for example, which put tariffs on wheat, which decreed that certain people should be dressed in fine wool, should have the right to polygamy or polyandry, to the exclusion of their neighbors who had voted the wrong way in the last elections. Often, at the whim of a woman who inspired the eloquence of a noted orator, the metallurgies of the west were sacrificed to those of the center, the refineries of the north to those of the south.

  For a long time, they functioned in that way, in an atmosphere of terror and reprobation, promulgating poverty or industrial servitude for an entire race, having no other rule than their caprice or the concerns of their personal ambition, removed, like the ancient dynasties, like the old authoritarian republics, from legitimate criticism and forearmed against the reprisal of citizens—for, in imitation of the plutocrats of old, they had bought all the newspapers, and all weapons, save for those of the Parliamentary Praetorian militias, had been destroyed.

  That conception of Socialism and Internationalism was nothing but the system of Karl Marx, modified according to the lessons of experience. It was an essentially Judaic theory—in fact Semitism, which had so completely enslaved Occidental mentality, had never had thinkers in antiquity, but only prophets, of which Karl Marx was the most recent. Once, Judaism had offered to save the civilized world by proposing a theogony, and, not having succeeded, had renewed its attempt by offering it, at hazard, a sociology. Drawn in its wake, Civilization had not wanted to study the mechanism of the World. Hunger, pride, self-interest and lust being the indestructible motors of individuality, it had claimed to break them with the Equity principle, after having striven in vain to annihilate them during the Middle Ages with the God principle.

  The road of aberration was, moreover, swept and smoothed by Literature, which had abused humans by means of all its masterpieces. For four thousand years the art of writing had existed in confinement within immutable sheaths, of madrigals to the Sun and Moon, to the stars, to little birds, under the pretext of praising Nature, without ever being able to take account of the fact that Nature was not the ambience or the location, the frieze of clouds or the range of verdure, that served to dress the stage on which the successive phenomena of existence unfolded, but rather the hidden forces unconsciously occupied in perpetrating a continual renewal of births, dolors and agonies.

  Soon, that new phase of human progress was perhaps more execrable than the former state of things. The southern races, the shore-dwellers of indolent seas, the thick-blooded Latins, averse to sustained labor, stuck in their lascivious dreams, playing with toys, for two thousand five hundred years, with the same esthetic formulae, the same artistic theorems, handed down the ideas of the dead from generation to generation, under the pretext of Classicism.

  In less that half a century, the Latins, only skilled in politics, taking the side of assisted peoples, transformed themselves into the poor relatives of the Great Occidental Society. By contrast, the Saxons affirmed their preponderance by the continuity of their effort, the quality and quantity of their production. Gradually, the free play of international aid became impotent to palliate the manifest inferiority of some of the associated Nations.

  On the other hand, in each ethnic agglomeration, individual property no longer existing, it was necessary—once the initial enthusiasm was past—to use frightful coercions to constrain citizens to make good use of the collective property in which almost all of them were disinterested. In every henceforth-useless barracks a prison or labor camp was installed for the use of recalciltrants and incorrigibles who set out to live as idlers, in the full glare of Justice.

  Limited and uncultured leaders did not take long to become dominant, by virtual of the omnipotence of the moral baseness that made them similar to the greater number and, by that very token, won them acclamations. Any freethinker or audacious writer who allowed himself to stigmatize the vices of the new rulers or the ridiculousness of existing Statutes was instantly mocked by the populace, whose orators praised their worst excesses.

  An improbable florescence of orators emerged at every dawn, like an eruption of pustules on the epidermis of a sick person. Everyone sought to exonerate himself from manual labor by means of the nobler work of the mind, and everyone had university degrees. The blessed Epoch of the universal Doctorate had final arrived. The merchants of panaceas, the sociologists of genius, the investors in philosopher’s stones, those who prided themselves on being able to reduce the slightest flaws of civilization could no longer be numbered, and competed for clients. In France every wine-shop counter of the old capitalist regime had been replaced by platforms from which hirsute individuals delivered harangues to meager audiences and sought to eclipse the triumphs of their neighbors.

  Happy times of Verbocracy and Pedantocracy! Audiences transported by enthusiasm, intoxicated to the point of vertigo, tirelessly swilling cut-price spirits, all the adulterated alcohols of electoral eloquence that conflicting masters of rhetoric poured out recklessly. The man who did not shine in speech or writing was immediately devolved to forced labor in the fields or the factory, and, in view of the excessively tiny number of those unfortunates, they toiled there for sixteen hours a day without respite, at the risk of excessive penalties for the slightest indiscretion.

  The land had almost ceased to produce bread; moribund industry was no longer sufficient to build and equip common habitations—but a hungry and shivering Humankind stood tall, proudly showing off its chest, for it was regulated by “triumphant Reason”—which is to say, by oratory imposture instead of the sword, the law or money. Plutocracy and Landed Feudalism had disappeared forever; no one any longer possessed private property; no one any longer domesticated his fellows by means of wealth or manifest hierarchies—but human flocks were abused, crowds enslaved, by the captious force of stupid emphatic trumpets.

  From the four cardinal points, in cities and rural areas, a dull rumble, a diffuse din, was heard, which stifled the sounds of life; it was the produce of the throats of orators at work. Civilization, in every epoch, having always had to recognize the excessive need to make futile speeches, there was reason to believe that, this time, the human species had attained a state of perfection.

  The “disinherited” of the social contract moaned in relentless labor in order to ensure the idleness of those who were “elaborating future happiness” or “adding to present well-being by thought,” and were, in reality, indulging themselves in miry and deceptive revelry.

  Nature continuing to distribute intelligence without taking account of social necessities, the innumerable cretins that she fomented in every generation did not take long, as before, to constitute “the living force of peoples” and to find masters.

  The Occident had finally given free rein to its mania for administration, for excessive organization. The thinnest wisp of straw, the smallest roof-tile and the most misshapen fruit were monitored by thousands of administrations, which blackened the pages of ledgers the size of stone slabs. An infinity of clerks, overseers and managers were entangled by texts, formulas and regulations whose invulnerable stupidity was only exceeded by their profusion. There were ten inspectors and as many foremen for a single manual worker, and Humankind was now solely composed by managers and department heads.

  Progressively, the old Society was reborn, further aggravated in its evils. Prey to the inevitable economic rivalry, the syndicates, with their loquacious leaders, were soon no more than group
s, anonymous societies of a sort, just as avid, with aspirations as base, as the vanished owners. Competition, momentarily tempered by the altruism and general exaltation of the beginning, made them hate one another and devour one another without pity or mercy.

  Thus, syndicalism moved gradually toward parliamentarianism, irresponsible and omnipotent bureaucracy. A new bourgeoisie emerged from the lower order, like the other, created by selection, even more ridiculous and gangrenous, if that were possible, than its predecessors. Capital no longer enslaved anyone, but authority, divided into infinitesimal parcels, corporatism based on “intellectual superiorily” lovingly forged the manacles of debasement. The newly-inaugurated “reign of Truth and Justice” ultimately permitted enjoyment and honors to whomsoever accorded with the stupid esthetics and tastes of the ever-unconscious multitude.

  The exchange values of international trade continuing to be realized in gold, a part of the evil stemmed from that. Social administrators took advantage of it to steal recklessly, and thanks to the eloquence that permitted them to trick audiences and disguise evil as good, and rascality as virtue, they were carried in triumph by the populations that had briefly criticized them, so negligible did the general interest seemed by comparison with individual interest, so impermeable were the brains of the masses to any species of comprehension.

  In spite of everything, the tendency of the human mind toward material progress is so tenacious that technology developed to a extraordinary extent. One example will summarize the flourishing state of human implementation. All long-range ships, which sometimes measured three hundred meters long, were submarines. Built in the shape of enormous cigars, they were drawn from one shore to the other of the Pacific or Atlantic by formidable electromagnets, which attracted the like iron filings. By that means they avoided storms and the journeys were completed without fear of collision, all the lines being rigorously parallel. The journey from New York to Le Havre only took fifty-two minutes, and no accident had ever been recorded.