"Olaf Stapledon - Light and the Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

the Party became an exclusive ruling caste. In China, under the influence partly of Russian communism, partly of European
capitalism, a similar system evolved, but one in which the common ownership of the ruling caste as a whole was complicated by




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Darkness and the Light




the fact that the great families of the caste secured a large measure of economic autonomy. As in Japan at an earlier stage, but
more completely and definitely, each great department of production became the perquisite of a particular aristocratic, or rather
plutocratic, family. Within each family, common ownership was strictly maintained.

There was a deep difference of temper between the two peoples. Though the Russian revolutionaries had prided themselves on
their materialism, the Russian people retained a strong though unacknowledged tendency towards mysticism. Their veneration of
Lenin, which centred round his embalmed body in the Kremlin, was originally simple respect for the founder of the new order;
but little by little it acquired a character which would have called from Lenin himself condemnation and ridicule. The
phraseology of dialectical materialism came to be fantastically reinterpreted in such a way as to enable the populace to think of
'matter' as a kind of deity, with Marx as the supreme prophet and Lenin as the terrestrial incarnation of the God himself. Marx's
system was scientific in intention, and it claimed to be an expression of intelligence operating freely on the data of social life. But
the early Marxists had insisted, quite rightly, that reason was no infallible guide, that it was an expression of social causes
working through the individual's emotional needs. This sound psychological principle became in time a sacred dogma, and during
the height of Russian imperial power the rejection of reason was as complete and as superstitious as it had been in Nazi Germany.
Men were able, while accepting all the social and philosophical theories of Marx, to indulge in all kinds of mystical fantasies.

In this matter the Chinese were very different from the Russians. Whatever the truth about ancient China, the China that had freed
itself from Japan was little interested in the mystical aspect of experience. For the Chinese of this period common sense was
absolute. Even in regard to science, which for so many Russians had become almost a religion, the Chinese maintained their
common-sense attitude. Science for them was not a gospel but an extremely useful collection of precepts for gaining comfort or
power. When the educated Russian spoke of the far-reaching philosophical significance of materialistic science, the educated
Chinese would generally smile and shrug his shoulders. Strange that the fanatical materialist was more addicted to metaphysical
speculation and mystical fantasy, and the unspeculative adherent of common sense was in this respect capable of greater piety
towards the occult depth of reality.

The culture of the new China was often regarded as 'Eighteenth Century' in spirit, but at its best it included also a tacit intuitive
reverence for the mystery which encloses human existence. Even after the bitter struggle against the Japanese there remained
something eighteenth century about the educated Chinese, something of the old urbanity and liking for decency and order. The
old respect for learning, too, remained, though the kind of learning which was now necessary to the aspiring government official
was very different from that which was required in an earlier age. Then, all that was demanded was familiarity with classical
texts; now, the candidate had to show an equally minute acquaintance with the lore of physics, biology, psychology, economics,
and social science. In the new China as in old, the supreme interest of the intellectuals was not theoretical, as it had been with the
Greeks, nor religious, as with the Jews, nor mystical, as with the Indians, nor scientific and industrial, as with the Europeans, but
social. For them, as for their still-revered ancestors, the all absorbing problem was to discover and practise the right way of living