As we saw in the
previous posting on this subject, modern socialism (which includes Marxist communism)
traces its roots to the thought of Robert Owen.
Owen’s theories anticipated the modern Welfare State as well as the
drift into secularism, the deification of the abstraction of humanity, the
decay of marriage and family, and a host of other ills attendant upon the
alienation of most people from direct ownership of the means of production, and
thus personal power and the means of participating as full members of society.
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| Robert Owen |
Where Owen got his ideas is impossible to say at this late
date. The only known record of Owen’s
early life is his own autobiography, left incomplete at his death. Where some autobiographies seem deliberately
intended to obscure intimate details by relating a series of more or less
connected anecdotes that reveal next to nothing about the writer (Robert Hugh
Benson’s Confessions of a Convert, G.K. Chesterton’s Autobiography,
and Fulton Sheen’s Treasure in Clay come to mind), Owen’s autobiography
presents a wealth of detail intended to glorify Owen and his thought.
This had a singularly unfortunate result in that even Owen’s
greatest admirers have been forced to acknowledge that he on many occasions did
not merely stretch the truth, he engaged in active invention to add luster to
his reputation as the messiah of a new vision of society. The reader sees Owen presenting himself as a
child prodigy who astounded his teachers and ended up himself the teacher during
the short time he spent in school, read countless books and apparently
remembered none of their titles or the contents (and rarely if ever picked up a
book after he left childhood), who as a child of five was in virtual control of
the household, and at the age of eight was consulted by his parents for his
advice and wisdom. At a time when
parents apprenticed their children at ten unless they continued their education,
Owen related that it was at his command that he left home at that age and never
returned until his death.
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| Robert Owen's Mill at New Lanark, UK |
A constant theme running through Owen’s autobiography and
his speeches and writings is his belief that religion is the cause of all of
humanity’s woes. It was religion that
instituted marriage and protected private property. If the triad of religion, marriage, and
private property could be abolished (so Owen believed), mankind would enter a
new age of prosperity, truth, love, justice, and so on. As a starting point, religion must be
abolished and its effects especially on children be ameliorated.
Interestingly, we learn from his autobiography that Owen’s
family was lax in its religious duties, but that after he left home he lodged
with a family where the husband and wife belonged to two different Christian denominations,
and they insisted on attending services of both every Sunday and often during
the week, along with their children and lodger.
From being the one day every week he had completely free, Owen’s Sunday
became a trial to be borne from early morning to late evening.
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| Robert Owen became a believer in spiritualism |
Not that Owen was against religion . . . as long as it
wasn’t religious. This is not as
contradictory as it sounds. If by
“religion” was meant worship or even acknowledgement of a transcendent God (or
even gods), then Owen was against it. As
noted, he considered that form of religion one of the greatest barriers to
human happiness ever invented. (At an
unknown time later in life, Owen began communicating with the spirits of the
dead, often being visited by his late friend the Duke of Kent, as well as
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Lord Byron, and a host of others,
including a number of prophets and patriarchs.)
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| Frank Podmore, Fabian socialist |
Owen’s true religion was the worship of humanity, and he
wanted, even desperately needed, his God — the People — to be absolutely
perfect. His theory was that people are
completely formed by their environment and, therefore, to have a perfect People
(and thus a perfect God), everything that got in the way of a perfect society that
would form a perfect People must be eliminated.
A national church, therefore, must be established (or, in
England’s case, reestablished and reformed along humanitarian lines) on a purely
practical basis, directed toward perfecting the social order to produce perfect
people. Thus, as Frank Podmore, one of
the founders of the Fabian Society, summarized Owen’s religious program as
presented in Owen’s A New View of Society (1813),
[T]he Church must be purged.
The theological dogmas which “constitute its weakness and create its
danger” must be “withdrawn”; all tests must be abolished, and all men invited
again within the fold, so as to constitute once more a truly National
Church. “For the first grand stop
towards effecting any substantial improvement in these realms, without injury
to any part of the community, is to make it the clear and decided interest of
the Church to co-operate cordially in all the projected ameliorations. Once found a National Church on the true,
unlimited, and genuine principles of universal charity, and all the members of
the State will soon improve in every truly valuable quality.” (Frank Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biography. New York: Haskell House Publishers, Ltd.,
1971, 118, quotes from Robert Owen, A New
View of Society, p. 322.)
Of course, there are one or two holes in Owen’s
theories. For one, if the environment
alone determines whether an individual is virtuous or vicious, why isn’t
everyone from the same environment identical?
For another, if people are formed entirely by their environment, how did
Owen realize that, and how did he alone break free?
That, however, was not the only problem, as we will see in
the next posting on this subject.
#30#