Unity or Charity?

"The fact is that “unity” is not always good, and “division” is not always bad. Indeed, some unity is downright diabolical. There is, for instance, nothing more united than a mob. The mob mentality is nothing other and nothing less than toxic unity."

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

The fact is that “unity” is not always good, and “division” is not always bad. Indeed, some unity is downright diabolical. There is, for instance, nothing more united than a mob. The mob mentality is nothing other and nothing less than toxic unity.

When G.K. Chesterton first came to the United States and visited New York City he was struck by, and even dazzled by, the lights of Broadway. “I had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope of coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks, advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God; colour and fire.” He was also struck by the chasm that separated the gargantuan glitz from the trash and trivia of the products being advertised. “What a glorious garden of wonders this would be,” he remarked, “to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.”

These days, it is not necessary to go to Broadway or Times Square to be affronted by flashing electronic billboards. They are everywhere. One can hardly drive a mile or two on any urban freeway without these eyesores disrupting the view of the landscape and distracting the serenity of the mind’s eye. Most of these affront our aesthetic sensibilities by the manner in which the ugliness of the medium matches the ugliness of the message. Occasionally, however, these billboards are not merely provoking but thought-provoking. One such billboard caught my attention recently and set me thinking. Most of its electronic space was taken up by a photograph of Martin Luther King Junior. Accompanying this image were words of advice that were almost an admonition: “Hope for unity in a world of division.” I’m not a scholar of Martin Luther King Junior, but I suspect that these are not his words but those of someone who is using or rather abusing his image to advertise an aphorism of their own, with which I doubt that he would have agreed, at least not without the necessary qualification.

Although the sentiments expressed in the aphorism seem “nice”, they are much less so when we insist that “nice” necessitates niceties. We need to look a little more closely at the meaning of the words to make sense of them. Once we have done so, we might be tempted to conclude that the sense is in fact nonsense.

Let’s subject the “nice” to such niceties. The fact is that “unity” is not always good, and “division” is not always bad. A totalitarian government can impose “unity” on its subjects, suppressing all dissident behaviour on the grounds that it is divisive. An empire can impose its will on the nations it has conquered, considering that the “unity” of the empire, whether it be the Pax Romana, the Pax Britannica or the Pax Americana, necessitates the crushing of any “divisive” nationalism among the peoples of the conquered nations. Some unity is downright diabolical. There is, for instance, nothing more united than a mob. The mob mentality is nothing other and nothing less than toxic unity.

And what of “division”?

It is good that human society is divided into individual families and that it is not united in government communes. It is good that villages and small towns are divided from each other and are not united in huge ecologically and economically parasitic conurbations. It is good that the map of the world is divided into individual sovereign nations, each of which reflects a unique culture which manifests goodness, truth and beauty. It is better to have individual nations shining forth their unique identities, like distinct flowers in the garden of culture, than have all nations united in a globalist and globalized monoculture. It is good for the government of people to be close to the people and therefore responsive to the people. It is good, therefore, for the political landscape to be divided between many empowered small and local governments than all power to be united into a large, centralized government. It is better for people to have a real stake and real ownership in the economy, which means that an economy divided into numerous small businesses is better than an economy united and “consolidated” into the hands of relatively few global corporations.

No, unity is not always good; whereas division can be not only good but necessary if peace and freedom are to prevail.

The thing for which we should hope is not unity but charity. We should hope for that authentic love of neighbour, which requires the selfless sacrifice of the self for the good of the other. The absence of such love, which is made manifest in Pride and the hatred which is its inevitable and inexorable consequence, is the root cause of the world’s problems. We should hope for a world in which the acceptance of responsibility for others takes precedence over the demand for one’s own “rights”.

I know that G.K. Chesterton would have disagreed with the triteness of this billboard and its message as much as he disagreed with the trash and trivia of the billboards he saw on Broadway. I suspect also that Martin Luther King Junior would have agreed with Chesterton. They would not have hoped for unity in a divided world but would have prayed for unity in charity as a means of preserving and protecting the healthy divisions in human society.

The featured image is “Unity of Strength Five male human profiles, aligned, reducing with distance” (between 1939 and 1946), by Reginald Mount. This file is from the collections of The National Archives (United Kingdom), catalogued under document record INF3/333 and is free to use, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.