Mind is no ones servitor.

A reminder that not all is lost

For the past month or so, I have been constantly engaged with the 1919 declaration of the independence of mind. The text written by Romain Rolland after World War I is one of the most fascinating manuscripts in modern intellectual history; in it, he exhorts us to:

“Arise! Let us free the mind from these compromises, from these unworthy alliances, from these veiled slaveries! Mind is no one›s servitor. It is we who are the servitors of mind. We have no other master. We exist to bear its light, to defend its light, to rally round it all the strayed sheep of mankind. Our role, our duty, is to be a center of stability, to point out the pole star, amid the whirlwind of passions in the night. Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we make no choice; we reject them all. Truth only do we honor; truth that is free, frontierless, limitless; truth that knows naught of the prejudices of race or caste. Not that we lack interest in humanity. For humanity we work; but for humanity as a whole. We know nothing of peoples. We know the People, unique and universal; the People which suffers, which struggles, which falls and rises to its feet once more, and which continues to advance along the rough road drenched with its sweat and its blood; the People, all men, all alike our brothers. In order that they may, like ourselves, realize this brotherhood, we raise above their blind struggles the Ark of the Covenant—Mind, which is free, one and manifold, eternal.”

From the ‘Declaration of the Independence of the Mind’ by Romain Rolland was originally published in L’Humanité, June 26, 1919.

signed by: Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Rabindranath Tagore, Jane Addams, and Hermann Hesse (and hundreds others).

A few notes:

Think about it, more than a century later, have we learned as a civilization anything from this exhortation, these poetic admonitions?

Still, the fact that great minds desire truth and independence is maybe a kind of hope that not all human striving is in vain? Maybe.

How precious is the freedom of our mind? How rare!

“Smaller in number are we, but larger in mind,” Yoda