As we saw in the
previous posting on this subject, Robert Owen, the Father of Modern
Socialism (and Communism) wanted to establish and maintain a perfect society in
this life, a constant theme of socialism for the past two centuries and more. Since he believed that people are formed
entirely by their environment, all that is necessary to create the perfect
society (so he claimed) is to abolish religion, marriage, and private
property. Everything will then be
perfect.
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| Robert Owen: Prophet of the New Vision of Society |
Owen’s weakness was not, however, in his logic, which
followed more or less consistently from his badly flawed premises, but that he
exempted from its conclusions both himself and any evidence that contradicted
it. As one biographer noted a few years
after Owen’s death in 1858, Owen divided humanity into three categories. These were, 1) the poor, who are prone by
their environment to vice and crime, 2) the rest of humanity, who have been
brainwashed by their environment to believe things they do not practice and so
are all hypocrites and frauds, and 3) Robert Owen, “who alone sees the true
condition of things, and to whom alone the secret of the remedy has been
revealed.” (Frederick Adolphus Packard, Life of Robert Owen. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Ashmead and
Evans, 1866, 65-66.)
As with all socialists (even before the term was coined cir.
1832), Owen’s goal was what is generally categorized as “the Kingdom of God on
Earth.” All traditional religion was to
be abolished and all the efforts of society were to be directed to the material
and moral improvement of society as a whole, with special emphasis on the poor.
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| Saint-Simon: Prophet of the New Christianity |
Owen’s goal was therefore indistinguishable from that of
Henri de Saint-Simon, although — consistent with the habit socialist messiahs
have of wanting to be thought original — Saint-Simon gave no credit to Owen,
whose ideas antedated Saint-Simon’s Le Nouveau Christianisme, published
posthumously in 1825. Both Owen and
Saint-Simon wanted a religion purged of its religious elements, what
Saint-Simon called “the New Christianity” and Fulton Sheen a century later
would call “Religion Without God,” the title of his second book.
Interestingly, where Owen and Saint-Simon wanted to eliminate
traditional religion and abolish God as God, de Lamennais, a much more
profound, even brilliant thinker (although, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed,
having a gargantuan ego that dwarfed even that of Owen) focused his efforts on
abolishing man as man. In both cases the
common goal was the creation of a perfect social order in this life.
Charles Fourier admired Owen’s work which, unlike his own,
seemed to have achieved a large measure of success. When Owen announced that, discouraged by the
refusal of other manufacturers in England or parliament to adopt his ideas —
including removing God from the Church of England (although he downplayed that
aspect of his proposals when making his presentations to members of parliament.
. . .), he was arranging to establish a socialist colony in the United States
(what became New Harmony, Indiana), Fourier applied for the job of CEO of the
project. Being rejected by an underling
(Owen had never heard of Fourier and instructed someone to get rid of him),
Fourier decided that Owen was a charlatan who, like Fourier’s now-deceased
rival Saint-Simon, was attempting to found a false religion of humanity in
competition with his, Fourier’s, true religion of humanity.
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| Fourier, True Prophet of the New Christianity |
In 1831, then, Fourier finally achieved a measure of
success by attacking the ideas of Saint-Simon and Owen in a pamphlet, Pièges et Charlatanisme de Deux Sects, St. Simon et Owen, as false
religions. Lending credibility to
Fourier’s accusations was the fact that the New Harmony project had failed, and
the so-called Church of Saint-Simonian was coming into public disrepute. This latter appears to have been as a result
of a series of entertainments characterized by “loose relations between the
sexes” — probably orgies — that offended
even the Parisians.
Owen’s proposals were not made any more attractive by the
fact that he not only proposed to eliminate the transcendent God and put
humanity in His place, he also wanted all male children trained as soldiers to
defend themselves and the new society by force of arms. This would be directed not only against
actual attacks, but used to force anyone whose thought, word, or deed suggested
that they opposed, or might oppose, the new world order. Characterizing all those who did not agree
with him as madmen, in A New View of Society (1813) Owen declared,
While, however, any part of mankind shall be taught that they
form their own characters, and continue to be trained from infancy to think and
act irrationally, that is, to acquire feelings of enmity, and to deem it a duty to engage in war, against those who
have been instructed to differ from them in sentiments and habits; even the
most rational must, for their personal security, learn the means of defence,
and every community of such characters, while surrounded by men who have been
thus improperly taught, should acquire a knowledge of the destructive art, that
they may be enabled to overrule the actions of irrational beings, and maintain
peace.
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| Owen proposed a Children's Crusade for Socialism |
To accomplish these objects to the utmost practical limit,
and with the least inconvenience, every male should be instructed how best to
defend, when attacked, the community to which he belongs. And these advantages are only to be obtained
by providing proper means to the instruction of all boys in the use of arms and
the arts of war.
As an example how easily and effectively this might be
accomplished over the British Isles, it is intended that the boys trained and
educated in the Institution at New Lanark shall be thus instructed; that the
person appointed to attend the children in the play-ground shall be qualified
to drill and teach the boys the manual exercise, and that he shall be
frequently so employed. That afterwards
fire-arms of proportionate weight and size to the age and strength of the boys,
shall be provided for them; when also they might be taught to practise and
understand the more complicated military movements.
This exercise, properly administered, will greatly contribute
to the health and spirits of the boys, give them an erect and proper form, and
habits of attention, celerity and order.
They will however be taught to consider the exercise an art rendered
absolutely necessary by the partial insanity of some of their fellow-creatures,
who, by the errors of their predecessors transmitted through preceding
generations, have been taught to acquire feelings of enmity increasing to
madness against those who could not avoid differing from them in sentiments and
habits; that this art should never be brought into practice except to restrain
the violence of such madmen; and in these cases it should be administered with
the least possible severity; and solely to prevent the evil consequences of
those rash actions of the insane, and if possible cure them of their disease. (Robert Owen, A New View of Society,
quoted in Subrata Mukherjee and Sushila Ramaswamy, editors, Robert Owen: His
Thoughts and Works. New Delhi: Deep
and Deep Publications, 1998, 44-45.)
Thus, Owen’s remedy for hatred and war was to hate
everyone whom he thought motivated by hate, and to declare war on the
warmongers. It becomes easier to understand
why John Keble regarded anything even faintly resembling Owen’s program as the
beginning of the end not only of the Church of England, but of civilization
itself. That was not all, however, as we
will see in the next posting on this subject.
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