GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

7IO ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE MODERNS
These are wealth! comfort and good living, by means of
which men seek to satisfy their bodily appetites. Since
there will never be enough of these things, the State will
be rent by continual struggle. Of that Communism which
I advocated in my ideal State, recommending that the
Guardians should live together and, that there might not
be a distinction among them between "mine " and " thine",
possess everything including their wives and husbands in
common, I see no sign in contemporary Russia/
(HI) PLATO'* REPUDIATION OP PERFECTIBILITY.
Plato would demur to the optimism which pervades communist
theory. Communist theory would appear to be
based upon the assumption that the lot of mankind must
inevitably, albeit intermittently and with occasional setbacks,
improve. This melioristic tendency is in part due
to the influence of the dialectical background of Marx's
philosophy. According to the dialectical formula the
development of history takes place through the synthesis
of contraries. The synthesis is itself more developed than
the contraries upon whose opposition it supervenes, and
whose different tendencies it reconciles and embraces. A
synthesis is, therefore, not only later in point of time, but
greater in point of merit This view is perilously like the
doctrine of the inevitability of progress. Yet nothing of
the kind is suggested by a reading of history. In innumerable
cases the outcome of conflicts has been not the establishment
of a more developed system, but the complete des-
truction of one of the opposed forces. To quote Bertrand
Russell:
4
'The barbarian invasion of Rome did not give rise to
more developed economic forms, nor did the expulsion of
the Moors from Spain, or the destruction of the Albigenses
in the South of France. Before the time of Homer
the Mycenaean civilization had been destroyed, and it
was many centuries before a developed civilization again
emerged in Greece. The examples of decay and retrogression
are at least as numerous and as important in history