PAOLA MARRATIthan the ancient Greek cities or certain ‘‘primitive tribes’’ does not change anything about
the principle. A society is closed because its essence is to include a certain number of
individuals and to exclude all others. The boundaries that define a society as closed have
nothing simply factual about them, just as the consequences they imply are far from
neutral. The morality and religion that Bergson has just described in their function of
providing social cohesion belong to closed societies: they would have no role to play in
anopen society. This open society does not yet exist and would have to embrace all of
humanity.
But why can the whole of obligation and the institutional, or institutionalized, reli-
gions not broaden the systems of moral and civic habits to include the whole of humanity?
Why is a break required and a different kind of morality and religion called for? Bergson
knows well that in each nation there is much talk about ‘‘duties toward humanity’’ (today,
this would be ‘‘human rights,’’ but the difference is not one of kind) and that these duties
are made out to be the natural prolongation, so to speak, of duties toward the family, the
institution, or the state, as if there were only a quantitative difference but no gap, no
tension. Yet, according to Bergson, this discourse is nothing but a fac ̧ade, whether it be
pronounced in good or in bad faith. It is enough to look at what happens when a war
breaks out: borderless human fraternity gives way to an outburst of violence; everything
is allowed against the enemy—murder, pillage, rape, torture, cruelty. To respond that
these are exceptional and rare events is but a delusion; there is nothing exceptional about
wars except our desire not to see them coming, to exclude them from ‘‘the normal path
things take,’’ of which they would only be an unfortunate accident.
In reality, the outburst of violence illustrates the nature of closed societies (to which
parliamentary democracies belong) and shows the other face of morality and religion.
Behind the peaceful regularity of habits, so necessary to social cohesion, an attitude can
be discerned: the attitude of discipline in confronting the enemy. No closed society, dem-
ocratic or not, can escape its instinct of cohesion, which is an instinct of war. The exclu-
sion that founds closed societies is thus not neutral or vaguely benevolent: it is essentially
hostile.^19
That is why, to Bergson’s mind, the belief that we could pass from love of the family
and of the nation to love of humanity in general by a continuous broadening of our
sympathy, by the progress of a sentiment that would grow while remaining the same, is a
mistake with grave consequences. We will never arrive at humanity in stages, via the
family and the nation: ‘‘Neither in the one case nor the other do we come to humanity
by degrees, through the stages of the family and the nation. We must, in a single bound,
be carried far beyond it, and, without having made it our goal, reach it by outstripping
it.’’^20
The leap does not, properly speaking, give us the ‘‘love of humanity in general.’’ An
object so vague would, rather, be apt to ‘‘cool the most ardent souls.’’ In any case, the
leap does not give us anything at all, and certainly no determined or determinable object.
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