Edward Carpenter: After the nadir of war, the regeneration of man

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

Edward Carpenter: Fears which inspire brutishness and cruelty of warfare

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Edward Carpenter
Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning

…there are signs that the recent Great War and the following events mark the lowest point of descent and the beginning of the human soul’s return to sanity and ascent towards the heavenly Kingdom. No doubt Man will arrive again some day at the grace, composure and leisurely beauty of life which the animals realized long ago, though he seems a precious long time about it; and when all this nightmare of Greed and Vanity and Self-conceit and Cruelty and Lust of oppression and domination, which marks the present period, is past – and it will pass – then Humanity will come again to its Golden Age and to that Paradise of redemption and peace which has for so long been prophesied.

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Max Müller has pointed out that among the words which are common to the various branches of Aryan language, and which therefore belong to the very early period before the separation of these branches, there are not found the words denoting war and conflict and the weapons and instruments of strife – a fact which suggests a long continuance of peaceful habit among mankind after the first formation and use of language.

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Society at large is perishing both in industry and in warfare through the domination in its organism of the self-motives of greed and vanity and ambition. This cannot go on for ever. Things must either continue in the same strain, in which case it is evident that we are approaching a crisis of utter dissolution, or a new element must enter in, a new inspiration of life, and we (as individuals) and the society of which we form a part, must make a fresh start. What is that new and necessary element of regeneration?

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A preposterous – one may almost say a hideous – social Age is surely drawing to its end. The debacle we are witnessing to-day all over Europe (including the British Islands), the break-up of old institutions, the generally materialistic outlook on life, the coming to the surface of huge masses of diseased and fatuous populations, the scum and dregs created by the past order, all point to the End of a Dispensation.