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By Rev. A. Powell Davies D.D.
February 19, 1950
I am not preaching this sermon because I think I understand treason.
In most respects it is as baffling to me as to anybody, and I lay no
claim to superior wisdom. But I have done a good deal of thinking
about it. Perhaps you have, too. I very much hope so. I hope so
because I believe that we need some better explanations than are
commonly offered to us. And I am taking up the subject with the
thought that if I cannot provide the right answers I may at least be
helpful in indicating some of the right questions.
We used to believe--most of us, at any rate--that a traitor was an
altogether evil person. His aims were low, his motives sordid and
his behavior squalid and iniquitous. That is the way traitors had
been described to us. But we should have known better. We should
have studied a story like that of David and Absalom in the Old
Testament. We should have considered the character of a political
assassin like Brutus. We should have learned a little more of
Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr. We should have recognized that
treason is seldom consciously evil and that its motives are almost
never simple and uncomplicated. And we should have known that what
has happened in the past can always happen in the present and the
future, too...
How does it come about--this is what we need to try to
understand--that one whose personal qualities seem admirable comes
somehow to serve an evil purpose and conspire against the loyalties
that, to the rest of us, seem good? How does a man, apparently
honest, arrive at a position where deception and duplicity are not
obnoxious to him? What happens to his sense of right and wrong?
And it is here, of course, that we must raise our first question.
How do we establish, as over against this man, our own standards of
right and wrong? From his viewpoint, what he is doing is right. If
we tell him that treason is always wrong, that no one has the right
to conspire against the society that nurtured him, he can remind us
that in 1776, two thirds of the American people were guilty of
treason; or at any rate that this was the opinion of the remaining
third. He can point out to us that we do not mind treason if the
society against which it is directed is repugnant to us. If a
citizen of the Soviet Union conspires against the Kremlin, we are
glad of it, and hope his treachery will prove successful. So how can
we contend that treason is always wrong?
We can meet these arguments, no doubt, to some extent: perhaps we
can even meet them to our own complete satisfaction. We can object
that the American Revolution was an open mutiny and not
conspiratorial; those who engaged in it were not for the most part
practitioners of subterfuge and imposture; they were forthright,
honest men. But to this the modern traitor might reply that in 1776,
conditions were favorable to forthright revolution, and that if the
revolution had not succeeded, the victorious tyranny of King George
III would have been resisted by every device available.
Since this conjecture might be true, there is nothing we can say in
answer to it--nothing, that is, which would convince a modern
American who had transferred his loyalty to the Soviet Union. What
it would come down to is the question of which society deserves his
loyalty, and if such a man had decided that his sympathies were
Russian, he could go on to tell us that he was entitled to do
whatever he could in furtherance of them. We might object to
this--that he could do it only through deception; we might say that
deception is an evil thing, no matter what the end in view, and that
if he stooped to conspiracy and fraud, he would corrupt and vitiate
whatever might be good in his own purposes. We could say this, but
he would not believe us. He would tell us that we were merely
voicing our own preferences; that we were prisoners of a bourgeois
moral code--a code which is not binding upon those who have
emancipated themselves from it. And, in short, that we are not the
final arbiters of right and wrong.
So that, as I say, the first question, and obviously an important
one, is the question of establishing standards: standards of right
and wrong. And we live in an age when this is far from easy.
Doubtless, it always had its difficulties, even in the days when
most of the world believed that moral standards were vested with
divine authority; but today, that belief has largely disappeared:
men do what seems right in their own eyes because they are not sure
that right and wrong have any other sanction; then, when they grow
tired of this, they make the Kremlin their authority--a substitute
for God.
Here, we begin to see what our second question must be--the question
of what it is that brings men to this spiritual allegiance, turning
communism into a religion and surrendering conscience to a secular
hierarchy. But we must wait a moment before we are ready to consider
it. We have not yet understood the question of the loss of
standards: standards of right and wrong.
Where do they come from, these standards? And what authority do they
ever have? This, of course, is one of the ultimate questions--and
has always been. The nature of it is brought out particularly well,
I think, by Bernard Shaw, in his play, Major Barbara. In the third
act of that play, Andrew Undershaft is trying to discover what
occupation his son should take up. He has a rather low opinion of
his son's abilities; and the son has an equally low opinion of his
father's social ethics. So the father suggests some possible
careers: literature, art, philosophy, the army, the navy, the legal
profession, the stage, but his son will have nothing to do with any
of them. "Well," says Undershaft, becoming impatient, "is there
anything you know or care for?" "I know the difference between right
and wrong," replies the son, rebukingly. "What!" exclaims the
father. "No capacity for business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy
with art, no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge of
the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the
lawyers, muddled all the men of business, and ruined most of the
artists: the secret of right and wrong. Why man, you're a genius, a
master of masters, a god! At twenty-four, too!"
The secret of right and wrong! Yes. The secret that baffles every
generation and resists the efforts, even of the wisest, fully to
disclose it. How sure can we be that what we call right is really
right? That what we condemn as wrong is truly so?...
The answer is that with our minds alone we cannot be sure. From the
ethics of revealed religion through the ethics of utilitarianism to
the ethics of communism--everything can be argued, and argued
interminably. That, doubtless, is what got the British physicist
into trouble.* In his father's words--and his father is reported to
be a theologian--this man has the mind of a genius and the soul of
an infant. He did not mean the soul of an infant in the sense of
unspoiled purity or simplicity. He meant--or I assume he did--in the
sense of an arrested spiritual development. The soul of the man is
stunted, dwarfed, ungrown. If this is not what was meant, it should
have been meant. For I am convinced that it comes as near to the
truth as words can come. There can be a mind like Spengler's, for
instance, stupendous, magnificent, but at the disposal of a soul
that never grew up. And because it never grew up, it never grew
strong enough to bear the burden of a fully human life; and so it
became sick and disordered and its sickness contributed to the rise
of Hitler and all the malignities of the Nazi epoch of German life.
To a lesser extent, the same may be said of Karl Marx. By a lesser
extent, I mean that the sickness of soul was less--not the
consequences to the world at large. And so may it be said of
Schopenhauer and Nietszche, and of many another. A brilliant mind
cannot of itself unlock the secret of right and wrong. Unless the
soul can grow--that is to say, the spirituality, the wide, deep
sympathy, the compassion, the inner hardihood which makes it
possible to deal strongly with one's own life and gently with all
other life: unless this inner mystery of heart and conscience can
break forth and go out with a man into the world in which he makes
his way--he will never find the right and wrong even of his own age,
his own time, his own generation, and its part in the struggle of
history. He will never know--will never allow himself to know,
until, perchance it is too late--that right and wrong are part of
the law of his life and that if he would, he might have seen them
well enough to follow them.
This is what we can understand when we read the writings of such
converted communists as Arthur Koestler. And very few who have not
read such writings will fully grasp what I am saying here, this
morning. A great many who have never been tempted to treason could
be tempted to it--if the circumstances of their lives had happened
to bring temptation near. They could be tempted because they have
not discovered what Arthur Koestler did--he, and many another, most
of whom have been speaking to us in vain--about this inward truth of
the human soul.
What is it that happens to an undergrown soul? Let us try to be
specific. Let us take such cases as occur--and might occur in
greater numbers--in our own American life. This ungrown soul is in
revolt against its own frustrations. It hates, perhaps, the neglect
or injustice suffered in childhood, and sees in every kind of
authority that represses or restricts it, the repugnant image of the
father. Here, we come to the dark places that modern psychology has
been trying to brighten for us. To the oppressions and rivalries of
childhood we can trace many of the feelings of persecution and
injury that are carried forward into adult life. Here, also, are the
hated inferiorities: inferiorities in attractiveness, in talent, in
virility, in any of a hundred ways--inferiorities which the stunted
soul refuses to accept as real but attributes to the evil nature of
the outer world which is constantly insulting and rejecting it. The
greater success of others is due to injustice, never to their
superior abilities, and so the success of others is hated and
rebelled against.
Gradually, a secret malice poisons the soul and prevents its growth.
Instead of defeat being distilled into wisdom, it becomes the ground
of mutiny. Instead of sympathy going out to others, it is turned
inward on oneself. Right becomes an expression, partly of a rational
desire for justice and partly of this hidden, secret malice. Wrong
is whatever stands in the way of what the distorted soul is wishing
for. Not, of course, that these facts are recognized--except
sometimes in the office of a psychiatrist, or through a spiritual
liberation or conversion. On the contrary, these evil motives unite
themselves with higher ones and turn their victim into a crusader.
The higher motives are just as genuine as the evil ones, but the
evil ones are likely to gain a camouflaged ascendancy, especially in
a crisis. And thus an individual who is a communist (or a fascist)
mainly because he is an idealist--or at least partly for that
reason--becomes in the end a conspirator against human society
because he hates human society. He hates it because it has not given
him what he wanted, and out of this hatred comes such a monster as
Hitler and all the lesser Hitlers of the entire Nazi psychosis; out
of this hatred, also, comes the malignant inner core of the
communist movement, highly developed mentally and stunted in soul.
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