HUMAN ADJUSTMENTS IN A CHANGING WORLD

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 37, 13 February 1937, Page 17 (Supplement)

HUMAN ADJUSTMENTS IN A CHANGING WORLD

FASCISM & COMMUNISM

Chaos and Cosmos

“What ha's surprised me since my arrival in Sydney,” says Mr. Yoshaiki Hatta, life member of the House of Peers of Japan, “is the growing Pacific consciousness of tho people, so much so, that when I refer to Japan or China as part of ‘the Far Ea«t,* there is some who object to the terminology, saying: ‘You are our neighbours.* And more and more of our people are referring to you as our neighbours rather than as westerners.*’ The old idea of Rudyard Kipling’s oft-quoted but misapplied line, “Oh, East is East, and West is West and never the twain shall meet,** has gone west. And the West has gone East, writes T. E. Ruth in The Sydney Morning Herald. Travellers are surprised to find how Western the Eastern cities are. Distinctions between the Orient and the Occident disappear. It is as Kipling said*

There is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men staud face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.

And Mr. Hatta says to Sydney people: “I am amazed at your generosity and alert and sincere desire for international (friendship.” Precisely. Something has gone into all the world. Life is different in every land. Old barriers are broken down. There is a new alignment. And a now centre of gravity. Neutrality is impossible. No country can completely avoid what used to be called “foreign complications.” Nothing is foreign any more.

“Go ye into all the world and prpacli the Gospel to every creature** Is Christ’s commission to His followers, still His marching orders to the Church. But the world is not what it was when those words were «poken. It is very different to tho world in which modern missions were born. It is very different to the world in which some of us wore born. It has radically changed within living memory. The new generation is living in a new world When I was a boy we knew precisely what countries were Christian

and which peoples were heathen. Missionary maps were printed in black and white—white for Christian, black for heathen, as Empire maps to-day print everything British in red. No missionary society with any sense of proportion or humour would now paint Europe white, meaning Christian. And only those who misread Bible history a.nd are blind to the political facts of our own time would identify tho British nation with the cho-seu people of God. Red may liavo a real religious significance. But it includes nonCliristiau religious and non-religious communities. The missionary white is now rather grey. Black is not as black as it is painted. Red does not always mean British. In some countries it means not reformation but revolution Even so, the colours are mixed. The war changed tho map of the world. The soap-box orator who informed his audience that “status quo” was merely Latin for tho mess wo’xo in was only technically wrong. The state we’re in is a mess. Ghaos! But chaos out of which cosmos is surely springing. It is true that ‘ 1 the nations lie iu blood, their kings a .broken brood.” In older countries everything has radically changed, oi is rapidly changing, bo radically, t>u rapidly, that in this remote and selfcontained continent it is exceedingly difficult to keep pace with the cables however much we try. Comparatively few of us try. It is felt to be next to impossible to relate facts to faith and maintain a mental scale of values

But we are not as remote as wo seem. The whole Hvorid is at the gates of this Pacific paradise. Tho world’s affairs cannot long be foreign to any of us. That is what the changing world,

means. We have become near neighbours with far-distant pdoples. The political map of tlio two continents containing two-thirds of tho population of the world has been re-drawn Tremendous strain is being put on the economic system in every country. New experiments are being made—industrial, political, national, international. Humanity is on the march, committed to a now crusade, engaged in a new adventure, taking part in a new pilgrimage, making new demands on personality discovering new (spiritual resources and being enriched by new physics and a new psychology.

Democracy is as dead in Germany ns it is in Russia. There is probably as much faith in spiritual ideals in Communistic Russia, and as much spiritual freedom as in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. There is no denying the tremendous driving power of dictatorships where democracy has died or never lived. With Fascism and Communism the British genius of government has nothing in common. Communism is engaged in a world campaign against what is called capitalism and Fascism would destroy almost everything we regard as personal rights. Basil Matthews begins his new book on “Shaping the Future” with a quotation from a sardonic young French poet: “Our fate is in the hands of six petrol merchants, who eat poached eggs and drink iced water, and discuss over the ’phone tbe gushing oil wells of Mo&soul.” There are men to whom tho political and economic machine is like Edgar Allan Poe’s nightmare story of walls gradually and irresistibly closing in to crush them Providence itself apparently has become a mechanised predestination, a (sort of Galvanism without God. There is no

denying the immense might of the machine. But man is not a marionette to be jerked this way and that against his will. Fascism is not our fate. It is something wo may have to fight, even in Australia.

Liberty, of course, runs a great risk iu the adventure of life grown so complex as ours. But mightier than the machine is the man who made it. “The problem of what man will do with the enormous possibilities of power which science has placed in his hands iis probably the most vital and the most alarming problem of modern times,” Julian Huxley puts it. “At the moment humanity is rather like an irresponsible and mischievous child who has been presented with a set of machine tools, a box of matches, and a supply of dynamite.**

Just so. There is needed a new men tality, a new morality, a new sense of responsibility to God. I believe it is coming, that it is bound to Coiue.”

There is a world of meaning in the reply of a mechanic to the question, “What is the most dangerous part of a car” He replied immediately, “The driver!** It is with the driver that wo are concerned, with the man behind tho machine —Imperialistic, nationalistic. Communistic. In man’s world nothing matters so much as man. Except God. Any Imperialism, nationalism. Communism—British, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese —which makes the machine everything and admits of no appeal from the State to the conscience, to man. to God, is pagan, even if it struts the international stage as Cliris-

Patriolism is not pagan. Loyalty is of the essence of the Christian faith. But civilisation is not Christian. Patriotism which comes prejudiced and narrow is blind. Imperialism may become jingoistic. Nationalism muy have no god but Caesar. The totalitarian Btate may be a soulless machine. Communism, with its insistence that man lives by bread alone, is Bolshevism without even the beginning to f brotherhood in it.

Comes tho great question What can wo do about it, personally?