The cry for “World Government” represents, I think, something like cosmic anxiety about the future. People are frightened. They ponder the prodigious problems and long for the magic of simple solutions. Have we, at long last, come to that hour in history which so many prophets of older days envisioned as an invitation for “The Coming Caesars”?
History is connected stuff. Happenings are related reactions. The dictatorships of the Stalins, the Mussolinies, the Hitlers and others arrive not by accident, but because a deep force is at work in the central flow of things. When Goering told the German people the need was desperate for “more guns and less butter,” Western civilization screamed its denunciation of “gutter ethics.” The strange influences have deepened their control. In Christian America last November a top government official told the nation the need is now for “less butter and more guns.” The trend is not trivial.
We now wonder at rather than criticize Spengler’s idea that this is “the age of world wars” and that “Caesarism” is setting armies, not parties, to be the future form of power. In the World Government dream it is significant to note how the emphasis everywhere falls upon “an instrument of overwhelming military force.”
Utilizing the central weaknesses of democracy, dictatorships have gotten miracles out of pelting the mass mind with senseless hopes. Incited individualism, uninhibited and ruthless, generates profound troubles. The result is that sick democracies troop to strange doctors. These medicine men with gifted cliches and fascinating nomenclature offer blueprints for every contingency. But the stabilities of civilization disintegrate until terrified and bewildered people literally beg for “controls” that will be strong and ruthless enough” to shoot mankind’s way to peace. World Government with matchless power thus offers fabulous hopes. In the background one can almost hear the ghost of Tacitus repeating the old lines: “In peace representative government, in war generals, in peril dictators!”
Disintegrating Democracies
Whether we like it or not, the whip of despotism cracks like rifle fire in the modern world. These despotisms are the frightening forces that today are making all of earth’s millions dance to their tunes. The principles of democracy seem like fading fires. Leaders, not people, are glamorized. “Spain is Franco and Franco is Spain.” “Peron is the Republic.” Churchmen and politicians hailed Mussolini as “the man sent by Providence.” Said Hess to the German people: “Hitler is what the soul of the country is.” Echoes in America spin up wonders. Writers in recent years speak not of democratic presidents but of “strong presidents.”
At this moment, military force is accepted as the only hopeful arbiter of humanity’s fate, a situation where the tendency usually gravitates into single-minded control. The spell of things calls for a saving greatness that they cannot themselves produce. The tensions now tightening to an explosive point, all over the world may answer themselves with a Caesar, or a Cromwell, or a Napoleon, or some one worse. In history the dangerous man is always waiting to exploit the social, political and religious tensions of difficult times.
If democracy softens up and loses its wondrous strength, designing despotism will systematically destroy its foundations. That is why wisdom must hold the ascendency of physical force to be suspect, even if it is lighted with the glow of that idealism which characterizes the dream of World Government. Power over other people is loaded dynamite. The more so when it pinnacles into enormities for ruling the globe. We cannot submit to “the great political superstition,” namely, the divine right of parliaments to absolute authority over the people.
In the budding years of this century only a few men saw with far vision the beginning of influences that could bring human storms.
No one in his good senses entirely dismisses the possibilities of those prophecies now.
An article in Harper’s Magazine (1902) extended the possible trajectories of those developing forces and said some amazing things about “the evil days to come” and about “hours of defeat.” “There will,” said the prophecy, “arise The Man. He will be strong in action, epigrammatic in manner, personally handsome and continuously victorious. He will sweep aside parliaments and demagogues, carry civilization to glory, reconstruct it as an empire, and hold it together by circulating his profile and organizing further successes. He will codify everything, rejuvenate the papacy or, at any rate, galvanize Christianity. He will organize learning into meek academies of little men and proscribe a wonderful educational system. And the grateful nations will deify a lucky and aggressive egotism.”
World Government
Contemplate the proposed World Government and the eventualities if an evil fate should give it wrong-way directions! Prevailing psychologies sag with desperate dangers. The “mass man” is here and the masses are on their way up. Society may have to develop a genius it has never shown before if it is to withstand demagogues promising paradise to earth’s millions, especially when hatred and the spirit of revenge are highly developed techniques. Politicians running a global government will use every means for quick results. The atmosphere is ominous. The mightiest of all ages is saturated with expediencies, with adulterated principles and catchwords that capture the mobs. Strange that the spiritual ambassadors are now dreaming of a paradise organized almost exclusively on military, political and economic lines!
World Government, taken realistically, faces enormous odds. Ponder the tensions in the making when the multitudes, as at no other period in history, are themselves becoming the force of law. How long will they come to heel before “One Voice Rule”? The outrages of misinformed mobs, on a global scale, will of course dramatize feeble responses to loyalty. The bait they yearn for is “advantages.” They will leave leader after leader in the lurch whenever somebody else offers better bribery. Even a superstate cannot crack down too far to get obedience. You cannot put millions of people in jail.
It would be easy to discount this picture of human nature, easy until one recalls the behavior of the multitudes when “the likest God this planet ever saw” was crucified at Golgotha. For self-safety the masses left the dying Christ who still is, whatever you say, the solitary grandeur of the world. If he with the genius of the spiritual did not hold the crowds in that terrible hour, what can world politicians do with nothing to fall back upon but the might of physical force? On this basis the emancipated (?) masses setting the gravitation of political history may be ominous. Especially when so many religionists are willing to put their trust in a world government with matchless military power.
Churchmen And The Masses
Without some new and more powerful spiritual influence, our age—which is a revolutionary age of the masses—may produce an all encompassing catastrophe. Against the dark background of affairs, the emotional dedication of churchmen, often the most aggressive exponents of World Government, may not be a hopeful omen. The law of political forces (Burkhardt’s) raises questions about the ability of this century to avoid “the rule of the masses” in its passage through perilous history. Toynbee wonders about the same thing, “the vast proletariat” now developing “one of the most portentous products of the Westernization of the world.”
Religious forces may be failing their assignments in permitting spirituality to be sucked into proletarianizing commonplaces without terrific protests. If Christianity weakens before the secularisms of the day, even the most idealistic of World Governments does not have a chance. The sweep of things the globe over is dark and bleak. The wickednesses of modern life are not withering away and their remedies seem nowhere in sight. A supergovemment is not the answer.
Of all the ills that human hearts endure
How small the part that Kings and Laws
Can cause or cure …
Power is not the way to the Kingdom. There is nothing in human nature to insure that an all-powerful World Government will not widen still more the gap between the tendencies to tyranny and the demands of the moral law. The issue is old and fundamental. In the historic English debate, defiant justice shouted, “The common law protecteth the King.” “That,” said the embittered monarch, “is a traitorous speech, the King protecteth the law and not the law the King.” Are the principles of democracy drifting now again to the side of the King? A socialist weekly emphasizes that in America “… the Presidency, rather than Congress, has become the main spring of the constitutional system.” How strange that people who have lived under democracy and who have experienced something of its wonder can so terribly misunderstand it. If we are to keep freedom we must undergo the fatigues of supporting it. Only lackeys will want somebody else—some organization or some selected group—to assume full responsibility. “In crisis hours peace must be sacrificed for freedom but never freedom for peace!” (Pericles).
Nothing is more anomalous than Christian leadership turning for miracles to peace, and not to liberty, to naked physical might and not to the spirit. “The men of the cloth tend by the nature of their calling to be naive and easily enlisted in glamorous causes.” Of this we have seen much. The World Government idea is, I think, a repeat performance. It is breath-taking to find the ambassadors of the love of Christ crusading for a top-boss rule “so strong that nothing on earth will be able to thwart its compulsions.” Especially when not a single guarantee of safety is offered anywhere, and when no magic exists for curbing human nature. Religionists laboring for a monolithic state caricature Galilee.
It is now easy for pulpits to glorify the man-made United Nations, for at the moment Western influences dominate it. What will happen when the deciding power in every issue will be in the hands of others?
Churchmen and military might! Will the drifts eventually spin, Hegel fashion, into a theology of the superstate, a rule to be trusted without a doubt, a force with divine right, a return to the idea that “the King can do no wrong?” Never before did man have such faith in politicians. The concept, in world form, would be a consummation of the principles of Nazi Germany, of Soviet Russia, of pre-Pearl-Harbor Japan: one top dictator, unimpeachable, infallible, the sole controller of men, of resources and of the military might of the globe. It appeals to certain minds in tough times. Certainly nothing is simpler than a Napoleon in charge. History says the gamble will be an evil force but what is history against the vast wishfulness of naive sentimentalism? When before did Christianity aim to meet hardships by setting up an oligarchy or by crowning some politician a king?
World Government will not escape the normal developments of human logic. At the start it will mean to exercise power usefully, but it will mean to exercise it. It will mean to govern well, but it will mean to govern. It may promise to be a kind master, but it will be master. “Power turns those endowed with it into tyrants.”
Real Risk Involved
There are some realistic and heavy-duty risks for Christianity in World Government. Today the real issue cries Think or Perish! Ponder the terrifying facts! Western civilization is a small segment of mankind. Christianity is smaller still. Enormous possibilities reside in these relations. The ultimate and momentous question is simply this: “Who will govern the world?” More than two billion of the earth’s inhabitants are either pagan, atheistic or non-Christian. A composite World Government—if honestly democratic—is something for Christianity to ponder and to fear. The very processes of democracy would destroy effective Christian influences, for in such a Government Christianity would be an insignificant and helpless minority. (The average religionist crusading for World Government is understandable. But there is a basis for fear when the echelons grow fanatical and equate the dream with something like the Kingdom of God.)
Contemplate the nature and psychology of a political government with 800,000,000 communists, all militant atheists; with 700,000,000 Moslems, all anti-Christians; and with almost a billion Indians and Chinese and other kindred Asiatics. In such an assembly, what would be the voice of Christianity? The law of democratic principles would sink it into silence. Other religious groups might be eliminated in the same fashion. But—and it is a terrifying thought—the atheistic powers, protected by numerical superiority, could never be eliminated. Furthermore, “the communists today have more fervor than Christians.”
World Government is then a bid to make godless communists and their multi-million allies the governors of the world. Russia and Red China with their communist satellites are thus assured in any democratic World Government the sovereignty of the planet. Such a shutdown on Christianity can be lethal business for mankind. You do not argue this when you know what is happening to the minds of the young people in the Soviet Union. Let’s be realistic. A democratic World Government may be Christianity’s road to nothingness. Think on these things! In the present United Nations, dominated for the moment by the Western powers, we see the parliamentary maneuverings to block what the West does not want. When the setup is otherwise, can we expect to find a higher behavior in conduct? Can you imagine a presiding Khrushchev giving Christian interests any effective influence? The process itself would decimate the soul and spirit of democracy. It would obliterate every civilized value.
The glamor-dream is to supplant individual nation-hoods with one big Jumbo Boss, assuming for reasons nowhere explained that this monstrous government, unlike every other political organization in history, will be administered by something like the love of God, and will forever be immune to any type of political corruption. The devotees cannot imagine that the glowing dream could turn into a terrible and hideous delusion. The fantastiques of history parade through the mind. Think of the Bolshevik vision of 1917. “The world today lives amidst the death agonies of that great dream. Now, only three decades later, a few mesmerized fanatics still exist, but for everybody else it has become clearer and clearer that a type of brutality and exploitation and sheer barbarism, such as history has never before known, is the consummation of those highest of 1917 hopes.”
The idea of World Government is a hypnotizing and a fabulously fascinating thing. It is easy to see why millions succumb. But Christianity should comprehend the immense and terrifying implications.
Commander H. H. Lippincott, United States Navy CHC, Retired, served as Chaplain with the United States Fleet from the First World War. He holds the A.B., A.M., and S.T.B. degrees from Dickinson College and Boston University, and once held pastorates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. He has written for religious, philosophical and literary journals. This article is a resume of a chapter from his forthcoming hook on World Government! Heaven Help Us!
