In his classic Varieties of Religious Experience (1922), Harvard Psychology Professor William James offers this definition of religious life:
Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul.1
Douglas made clear that this religious point of view was at the base of his view of life. In a speech in Sydney in 1933 he said the following:
… it is my own belief, and I might also say that it is almost my only religion that there is … a ‘canon’”.
(…)
There is running through the nature of the Universe something that we may call a “canon”. 2 it is the thing which is referred to in the Gospel of St. John as the “Logos,” the “Word”. It has an infinite variety of names. The engineer and the artist refer to it when they say that they have got something “right”. Other people mean the same thing when they talk about absolute truth, or reality. By whatever name you wish to refer to this idea, it does not matter vey much; we all instinctively recognise its existence whether we meet it in something like architectural proportions as, say, the cenotaph, or even in the grim lines of a battleship.
(…)
Genuine success only accompanies a consistent attempt to discover and to conform to this canon in no matter what sphere our activities may lie.3
While this process of discovering and adapting ourselves to the unseen order has been the norm over the vast sweep of human history it is no longer at the center of our culture’s motivational structure. We don’t believe in anything unseen, and it follows that one can’t be obedient to something one doesn’t believe exists. This is what it means to be a materialistic society.
I was thinking about this when I was in Sydney last week. Undoubtedly coming from the country makes such mundane experiences more curious. The day was awful, dull with rain and wind, yet thousands of people, and what seemed like even more cars, were moving around with the most frantic energy. There were people from all over the world, all colours and shapes, but fitted out in the same style and determination. They were all working, going to work, on a break from work, between workplaces. “Making” money. It struck me how in a materialistic society, compelled to find its answers in things, economics becomes the organising social force.
This, I think, explains why it is so difficult to convey the Douglas Social Credit message. An alternative social organisation which doesn’t orbit around the concept of trade and money can hardly be imagined. “What would people do all day?” No sense of the “canon” or “unseen order” exists in people’s minds to suggest an alternative focal point to organise ourselves around.
In this light an excessive focus on Douglas’ economic ideas is to put the cart before the horse. People do not obey the dictates of the economic system because they understand economics. It’s demonstrably irrational. Rather, their obedience indicates their belief in it, and what follows, sometimes with bizarre results, is a confounded attempt to adapt to the belief. Conformity to the economic world order is very largely a question of faith, which is only to say, as Douglas did, that money has taken the place of religion.
The problem runs much deeper than economics. It is that, as a culture, we are guilty of the sin of idolatry, which Douglas defined in Warning Democracy:
I should define idolatry as the practice of taking some object or virtue, and without understanding or even trying to understand its true nature, investing it with attributes which do not belong to it. 4
This is precisely what we have done with money. Idolatry is the first prohibition in the ten commandments and, as everything crumbles down around our ears, a few of us are beginning to remember why. It was the only transgression which the Ancient Greeks would have considered sinful, in the sense that we use that word. They called it hubris and it meant, “a failure of that proper subordination, a breaking of that due order of things upon which life in this world must be founded.” The consequence, they believed was “certain punishment.”5
In the Development of World Dominion Douglas wrote “Social Credit is Christian, not primarily because it was designed to be Christian, but because it was painstakingly “dis”-(un)-covered reality.”6 In other words it is a product of this process of apprehending the unseen order. A revelation derived from the development of a religious impulse.
“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”7 Is there anyone willing to argue about where we land in that pair? What is needed, above all else, is a spiritual revolution which would provide people with the far-sightedness required to grasp the meaning of what Douglas uncovered for us.
Why did the great literary critic and Social Crediter A.R. Orage leave his editorship of The New Age in 1922 to take up with the mystic George Gurdjieff? “To find God” Orage recalled, adding “I only wish that my motives could be as clearly conscious as that would imply.” T. S. Eliot thought his economics had a lot to do with it. Orage, he said “saw that any real change for the better meant a spiritual revolution; and he said that no spiritual revolution was of any use unless you had a practical economic scheme.”8
Food for thought.
1. James, W. 1982. The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Penguin Classics, The United States of America. p. 53
2. Canon /noun/ a body of principles, rules, standards, or norms
3. Douglas in Heydorn, O. 2016. Social Credit Philosophy. International Academy of Philosophy Press, Spain. p. 37
4. Ibid. p. 94
5. De Selincourt, A. 1962. The World of Herodotus. Little brown and Company, Canada p. 60
6. Douglas, C.H. 1969. The Development of World Dominion. Tidal Publications, Sydney.
7. Definition of Mammon/ noun / wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship and devotion
8. Taylor, P. B. 2001. Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium, Weiser Books, Maine.