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

719 ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE MODERNS
Whether Marx would in fact have met the objection on
these lines I do not know, but there is, I think, no doubt
that it is on these lines that modern communist theory
would seek to meet it. The answer! if given, would, I think,
fall consistently within the general framework of Marx's
theoretical philosophy* In practice,, however, the general
tone of communist polemics is pervaded by an optimism
which is also characteristic of die communist attitude -to
the future. This optimism is nowhere more marked than
in Marx's own work. Mane did not foresee, or, if he did,
did not make allowance for, the enormous increase in
men's power of destruction, from which the chief danger
to modern civilization arises*
Plato's Inherent Pessimism in Regard to Human Society.
Now the view that Communism is the next stage in his*
torical dmhpmcnt, coupled as it is with the belief that
Communism is a good, would have been thoroughly anti-
pathetic to Plato's whole manner of thought, for it presupposes
that man is on the whole and at bottom rational
and teachable, and that through teaching his rationality
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can be increased. "This presupposition, Plato would say,
'is only a particular example of that heresy which main-
tains that the history of mankind witnesses a progress
from imperfection to perfection. The causes of this heresy,
in the form which it assumes in your twentieth century
world, arise from an accident of history, and are not difficult
to detect. This accident is the increased power over nature
which enabled mankind to multiply commodities in the
nineteenth century. Man, it seemed, was in a fair way to
subdue his external enemies, fire and flood, pestilence,
disease and want, and his victory naturally led to a belief
that an extension of his progress along the same lines
would inaugurate a millennium. The world, then, as it
appeared to your nineteenth century predecessors and
you communists seem to have inherited their beliefappeared
to be moving towards the realisation of an ever
greater instalment of good. But man's true enemy is within