Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 31
Error in the political system of resistance
815. Having shown the harmful errors at the heart of the system of movement, we now have to indicate those which infect the contrary system of resistance. The very word resistance sounds harsh and inimical to mankind, and ensures that the system it indicates is less popular and less damaging than the system of movement.
816. There is no doubt that humankind has a natural, legitimate movement. Opposing this movement entails opposing nature and God, the author of nature. At the same time there exists an illegitimate, stimulated, troubled movement which proceeds not from nature, but from the abuse of human freedom. Opposition to this movement means opposition to evil, and defence of nature and its author. It is not hard to see that the system of wise government is not that of movement alone, nor of resistance alone. It must be a mixed system, that is, consist `in the promotion of the natural and legitimate movement of mankind, and in the prevention, to the extent that government can achieve this, of unnatural, illegitimate movement.’
817. Up to this point, things are simple: no one of good sense is going to veto such a temperate, all-embracing system. Differences of opinion can arise, however, when we consider the natural, legitimate movement we have to promote, and the unnatural, illegitimate movement we have to prevent. The answer to this problem will be found to a great extent in what we have already said.
818. The great end of every society is contentment of spirits. This has to be the rule with which to discern natural from unnatural movement. Human nature as a whole, considered as person, seeks contentment alone. Natural movement, therefore, is that which leads to this state. This has to be promoted; the contrary is an evil which, as far as possible, must be prevented. Unsatisfiable capacities are absolute impediments to contentment. We saw that their origin lies in the will’s abuse of the faculty of abstraction. This faculty, in contradistinction to that of thought which conceives things in their entirety, presents the spirit with the separate qualities of things. The spirit, halting before these separate qualities, seeks in each of them what is found only in their entire complex, and sometimes not even there. Its desires are frustrated. The principle leading human beings to contentment is therefore `the just judgments with which things are esteemed for what they really are when the part is not taken for the whole, nor the abstract for the concrete.’
Such integrity of judgment should form the principal aim of education. A view as complete and all-embracing as this is due, as I said elsewhere, to Christianity.(352)
Notes
(352) Cf. Saggio sull'unità dell'educazione, in the first volume of Opuscoli Filosofici, p. 213 ss.