Continuing our examination of the practical task before the modern
mind, we may next note the main lines of contemporary aspiration
within this comprehensive outline of a world commonweal. Any sort of
unification of human affairs will not serve the ends we seek, we aim
at a particular sort of unification; a world Cæsar is hardly better
from the progressive viewpoint than world chaos; the unity we seek must
mean the liberation of human thought, experiment and creative effort. A
successful conspiracy merely to seize governments and wield and retain
world power would be at best only the empty frame of success, it might
be the exact reverse of success. Release from the threat of war and
the waste of international economic conflicts is a poor release if it
demands as its price the loss of all other liberties.
It is because we desire a unification of human direction, not simply
for the sake of unity, but as a means to certain definite ends,
that it is necessary, at any cost--in delay, in loss of effective
force, in strategic or tactical disadvantage--that the light of free,
abundant criticism should play upon that unified direction and upon
the movements and organisations leading to the establishment of that
unified direction.
Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trustworthy in the dark.
Neither morally nor intellectually is he safe from lapses. Most of
us who are past our first youth know how little we can even trust
ourselves, and are glad to have our activities checked and guarded
by a sense of inspection. It is for this reason that a movement to
realise the conceivable better state of the world, must deny itself
the advantages of secret methods or tactical insincerities. It must
leave that to its adversaries. We must declare our end plainly from the
outset and risk no misunderstandings of our procedure.
The conspiracy of modern religion against the established institutions
of the world must be an open conspiracy and cannot remain righteous
otherwise. It is lost if it goes underground. Every step to world unity
must be taken in the daylight, or the sort of unity that will be won
will be found to be scarcely worth the winning. The essential task will
have to be recommenced within the mere frame of unity attained.
This candid attempt to take possession of the whole world must be made
in the name and for the sake of science and creative activity. It is to
release science and creative ability, and every stage in the struggle
must be watched and criticised, lest there be any sacrifice of these
ends to the exigencies of conflict.
The security of creative progress and creative activity implies a
competent regulation of the economic life in the collective interest.
There must be food, shelter and leisure for all. The fundamental needs
of the animal life must be assured before human life can have free
play. Man does not live by bread alone; he eats that he may learn and
adventure creatively, but unless he eats he cannot adventure. His
life is primarily economic, as a house is primarily a foundation, and
economic justice and efficiency must underlie all other activities,
but to judge human society and organise political and social activities
entirely on economic grounds is to forget the objectives of life’s
campaign in a pre-occupation with supply.
It is true that man, like the animal world in general from which he
has arisen, is the creature of a struggle for sustenance, but unlike
the animals, man can resort to methods of escape from that competitive
pressure upon the means of subsistence, which has been the lot of every
other animal species. He can restrain the increase in his numbers
and he seems capable of still quite undefined expansions of his
productivity per head of population. He can escape therefore from the
struggle for subsistence altogether with a surplus of energy such as no
other kind of animal species has ever possessed. Intelligent control
of population is a possibility which puts man outside the competitive
processes that have hitherto ruled the modification of species, and he
can be released from these processes in no other way.
There is a clear hope that later, directed breeding will come within
his scope, but that goes beyond his present range of practical
achievement, and we need not discuss it further here. Suffice it
for us here that the world community of our desires, the organised
world community conducting and ensuring its own progress, requires a
deliberate collective control of population as a primary condition.
There is no strong instinctive desire for multitudinous offspring
as such, in the feminine make-up. The reproductive impulses operate
indirectly. Nature ensures a pressure of population through passions
and instincts that, given sufficient knowledge, intelligence and
freedom on the part of women, can be satisfactorily gratified and
tranquillised if need be, without the production of numerous children.
Very slight adjustments in social and economic arrangements will, in
a world of clear available knowledge and straightforward practice
in these matters, supply sufficient inducement or discouragement to
affect the general birthrate or the birthrate of specific types as the
directive sense of the community may consider desirable. So long as
the majority of human beings are begotten involuntarily in lust and
ignorance, so long does man remain like any other animal under the
moulding pressure of competition for subsistence. Social and political
processes change entirely in their character when we recognise the
possibility of practicability of this fundamental revolution in human
biology.
In a world so relieved, the production of staple necessities presents
a series of problems altogether less distressful than those of the
present scramble for possessions and self-indulgence on the part of the
successful and for work and a bare living on the part of the masses.
With the increase of population unrestrained there was, as the end
of the economic process, no practical alternative to a multitudinous
equality at the level of bare subsistence, except through such an
inequality of economic arrangements as allowed a minority to maintain a
higher standard of life by withholding whatever surplus of production
it could grasp, from consumption in mere proletarian increase. In the
past and at present, what is called the capitalist system, that is to
say the unsystematic exploitation of production by private owners
under the protection of the law, has, on the whole, in spite of much
haste and conflict, worked beneficially, by checking the gravitation to
a universal low-grade consumption which would have been the inevitable
outcome of socialism oblivious of biological processes. With effective
restraint upon the increase of population, however, entirely new
possibilities open out before mankind.
The besetting vice of economic science, orthodox and unorthodox alike,
has been the vice of beginning in the air, with current practice and
current convictions, with questions of wages, prices, values and
possession, when the profounder issues of human association are really
not to be found at all on these levels. The primary issues of human
association are biological and psychological, and the essentials of
economics are problems in applied physics and chemistry. The first
thing we should examine is what we want to do with natural resources,
and the next, how to get men to do what has to be done as pleasurably
and effectively as possible. Then we should have a standard by which to
judge the methods of to-day.
But the academic economists and still more so Marx and his followers,
refuse to deal with these fundamentals, and with a stupid air of sound
practical wisdom, insist on opening up their case with an uncritical
acceptance of the common antagonism of employers and employed and a
long rigmarole about profits and wages. Ownership and expropriated
labour are only one set of many possible sets of economic method.
The economists, however, will attend seriously only to the current
set, the rest they ignore, and the Marxists with their uncontrollable
disposition to use nicknames in the place of judgments, condemn all
others as “Utopian”--a word as final in its dismissal from the minds
of the elect as that other pet counter in the Communist substitute for
thought, “Bourgeois.” If they can persuade themselves that an idea or
a statement is “Utopian” or “Bourgeois,” it does not seem to matter in
the least to them whether it is right or wrong. It is disposed of. Just
as in genteeler circles anything is disposed of that can be labelled
“atheistical,” “subversive” or “disloyal.”
If a century and a half ago the world had submitted its problems of
transport to the economists they would have put aside, with as little
wasted breath and ink as possible, all talk about railways, motor-cars,
steamships and aeroplanes, and, with a fine sense of extravagance
rebuked, set themselves to long neuralgic dissertations, disputations
and treatises upon high-roads and the methods of connecting them,
turnpike gates, canals, the influence of lock-fees on bargemen, tidal
landing places, anchorages, surplus carrying capacity, carriers,
caravans, hand-barrows and the pedestrianariat. There would have been
a rapid and easy differentiation in feeling and requirements between
the horse-owning minority and the walking majority; the wrongs of the
latter would have tortured the mind of every philosopher who could
not ride and been minimised by every philosopher who could, and there
would have been a broad rift between the narrow footpath school, the no
footpath school and the school which would look forward to a time when
every horse would have to be led along one universal footpath under
the dictatorship of the pedestrianariat. All with the profoundest
gravity and dignity. These things, footpaths and roads and canals with
their traffic, were “real,” and “Utopian” projects for getting along
at thirty or forty miles an hour or more up hill and against wind and
tide, let alone the still more incredible suggestion of air transport,
would have been smiled and sneered out of court. Life went about on its
legs, with a certain assistance from wheels, or floated, rowed and was
blown about on water; so it had been--and so it would always be.
But as soon as this time-honoured pre-occupation with the allotment of
the shares of originators, organisers, workers, owners of material,
credit dealers and tax collectors in the total product, ceases to be
dealt with as the primary question in economics, as soon as we liberate
our minds from a pre-occupation which from the outset necessarily makes
that science a squabble rather than a science, and begin our attack
upon the subject with a survey of the machinery and other productive
material required in order that the staple needs of mankind should
be satisfied, if we go on from that to consider the way in which all
this material and machinery can be worked and the product distributed
with the least labour and the greatest possible satisfaction, we
shift our treatment of economic questions towards standards by which
all current methods of exploitation, employment and finance can be
judged rather than wrangle over. We can dismiss the question of the
claims of this sort of participant or that for later and subordinate
consideration, and view each variety of human assistance in the general
effort entirely from the standpoint of what makes that assistance least
onerous and most effective.
The germs of such really scientific economics exist already in the
study of industrial organisation and industrial psychology. As the
science of industrial psychology in particular develops, we shall
find all this discussion of ownership, profit, wages, finance and
accumulation, which has been treated hitherto as the primary issues
of economics, falling into place under the larger enquiry of what
conventions in these matters, what system of money and what conceptions
of property, yield the greatest stimulus and the least friction in that
world-wide system of co-operation which must constitute the general
economic basis to the activities of a unified mankind.
Manifestly the supreme direction of the complex of human economic
activities in such a world must centre upon a bureau of information and
advice, which will take account of all the resources of the planet,
estimate current needs, apportion productive activities and control
distribution. The topographical and geological surveys of modern
civilised communities, their government maps, their periodic issue
of agricultural and industrial statistics, are the first crude and
inco-ordinated beginnings of such an economic world-intelligence. In
the propaganda work of David Lubin, a pioneer whom mankind must not
forget, and in his International Institute of Agriculture in Rome,
there were the beginnings of an impartial review month by month and
year by year of world production, world needs and world transport. Such
a great central organisation of economic science would necessarily
produce direction; it would indicate what had best be done here, there
and everywhere, solve general tangles, examine, approve and initiate
fresh methods and arrange the transitional process from old to new.
It would not be an organisation of will, imposing its will upon a
reluctant or recalcitrant race; it would be a direction, just as a map
is a direction. A map imposes no will on anyone, breaks no one in to
its “policy.” And yet we obey our maps.
The will to have the map, full, accurate and up-to-date and the
determination to have its indications respected, would have to pervade
the whole community. To nourish and sustain that will must be the task
not of any particular social or economic division of the community but
of the whole body of religious-minded people in that community. The
organisation and preservation of that power of will is the primary
undertaking, therefore, of a world revolution aiming at universal
peace, welfare and happy activity.
The older and still prevalent conception of government is bullying,
is the breaking-in and subjugation of the “subject,” to the God, or
King, or Lords of the community. Will-bending, the overcoming of the
recalcitrant junior and inferior, was an essential process in the
establishment of primitive societies, and its tradition still rules our
education and law. No doubt there must be a necessary accommodation of
the normal human will to every form of society; no man is immaculately
virtuous; but compulsion and restraint are the friction of the social
machine and, other things being equal, the less compulsive social
arrangements are, the more willingly, naturally and easily they are
accepted, the less wasteful of moral effort and the happier that
community will be. The ideal state, other things being equal, is
the state with the fewest possible number of will fights and will
suppressions. This must be a primary consideration in determining the
economic, biological and mental organisation of the world community at
which we aim.
We have advanced the opinion that the control of population pressure
is practicable without any violent conflict with “human nature,” that
given a proper atmosphere of knowledge and intention, there need be
far less suppression of will in relation to production than prevails
to-day. In the same way, it is possible that the general economic life
of mankind may be made universally satisfactory, that there may be an
abundance out of all comparison greater than the existing supply of
things necessary for human well being, freedom and activity, with not
merely not more but infinitely less subjugation and enslavement than
now occurs. Man is still but half born out of the blind struggle for
existence and his nature still partakes of the infinite wastefulness of
his mother Nature. He has still to learn how to price the commodities
he covets in terms of human life. He is indeed only beginning to
realise that as something to be learnt. He wastes will and human
possibility extravagantly in his current economic methods.
We know nowadays that the nineteenth century expended a great wealth
of intelligence upon a barren controversy between Individualism and
Socialism. They were treated as mutually exclusive alternatives instead
of being questions of degree. Human society has been, is and always
must be, an intricate system of adjustments between unconditional
liberty and the disciplines and subordinations of co-operative
enterprise. Affairs do not move simply from a more individualist
to a more socialist state or vice versa; there may be a release of
individual initiative going on here and standardisation or restraint
increasing there. Personal property never can be socially guaranteed
and yet unlimited in action and extent as the extremer individualists
desired, nor can it be “abolished” as the extremer socialists
proposed. Property is not robbery, as Proudhon asserted; it is the
protection of things against promiscuous and mainly wasteful use. In
some cases it may restrict or forbid a use of things that would be
generally advantageous, and it may be and is frequently unfair in its
assignment of initiative, but the remedy for that is not an abolition
but a revision of property. In the concrete it is a form necessary
for liberty of action upon material, while abstracted as money, that
liquidated generalised form of property, it is a ticket for individual
liberty of movement and individual choice of reward.
The economic history of mankind is a history of the operation of
the idea of property; it relates the conflict of the unlimited
acquisitiveness of egoistic individuals against the resentment of the
disinherited and unsuccessful and the far less effective consciousness
of a general welfare. Money grew out of a system of abstracting
conventions and has been subjected to a great variety of restrictions,
monopolisations and regulations. It has never been an altogether
logical device and it has permitted the most extensive and complex
developments of credit, debt and dispossession. All these developments
have brought with them characteristic forms of misuse and corruption.
The story is intricate and the tangle of relationships of dependence,
of pressure, of interception, of misdirected services, crippling
embarrassments and crushing obligations in which we live to-day admits
of no such simple and general solutions as many exponents of socialism,
for example, seem to consider possible.
But the thought and investigations of the past century or so have made
it clear that a classification of property according to the nature of
the rights exercisable and according to the range of ownership involved
must be the basis of any system of social justice in the future.
Certain things, the ocean, the air, rare wild animals, must be the
collective property of all mankind and cannot be altogether safe until
they are so regarded, and until some concrete body exists to exercise
these proprietary rights. Whatever collective control exists must
protect these universal properties, the sea from derelicts, the strange
shy things of the wild from extermination by the hunter and the foolish
collector. The extinction of many beautiful creatures is one of the
penalties our world is paying for its sluggishness in developing a
collective common rule. And there are many staple things and general
needs that now also demand a unified control in the common interests.
The raw material of the earth should be for all, not to be monopolised
by any acquisitive individual or acquisitive sovereign state, and not
to be withheld from exploitation for the general benefit by any chance
claims to territorial priority of this or that backward or bargaining
person or tribe.
In the past, most of these universal concerns have had to be left to
the competitive enterprise of profit-seeking individuals because there
were as yet no collectivities organised to the pitch of ability needed
to develop and control these concerns, but surely nobody in his senses
believes that the supply and distribution of staple commodities about
the earth by irresponsible persons and companies working entirely for
monetary gain, is the best possible method from the point of view of
the race as a whole. The land of the earth, all utilisable natural
products, have fallen very largely under the rules and usages of
personal property because that was the only recognised and practicable
form of administrative proprietorship in the past. The development
both of extensive proprietary companies and of government departments
with economic functions has been a matter of the last few centuries,
the development that is to say of communal, more or less impersonal
ownership, and it is only through these developments that the idea of
organised collectivity of proprietorship has become credible.
Even in quite modern state enterprises there is a tendency to recall
the rôle of the vigilant, jealous and primitive personal proprietor in
the fiction of ownership by His Majesty the King. In Great Britain,
for example, George Rex is still dimly supposed to hover over the
Postmaster General of his Post Office, approve, disapprove and call
him to account. But the Postal Union of the world which steers a
registered letter from Chile to Norway or from Ireland to Pekin is
almost completely divorced from the convention of an individual owner.
It works; it is criticised without awe or malice. Except for the
stealing and steaming of letters by the political police of various
countries, it works fairly well. And the only force behind it to keep
it working well is the conscious common sense of mankind.
But when we have stipulated for the replacement of individual private
ownership by more highly organised forms of collective ownership,
subject to free criticism and responsible to the whole republic of
mankind, in the general control of sea and land, in the getting,
preparation and distribution of staple products and in transport,
we have really named all the possible generalisations of concrete
ownership that the most socialistic of contemporaries will be disposed
to demand. And if we add to that the necessary maintenance of a money
system by a central world authority upon a basis that will make
money keep faith with the worker who earns it, and represent from
first to last for him the value in staple commodities he was given
to understand it was to have, and if we conceive credit adequately
controlled in the general interest by a socialised world banking
organisation, we shall have defined the entire realm from which
individual property and unrestricted individual enterprise have been
excluded. Beyond that, the science of social psychology will probably
assure us that the best work will be done for the world by individuals
free to exploit their abilities as they wish. If the individual
land-owner or mineral-owner disappears altogether from the world, he
will probably be replaced over large areas by tenants with considerable
security of tenure, by householders and by licensees under collective
proprietors. It will be the practice, the recognised best course,
to allow the cultivator to profit as fully as possible by his own
individual productivity and to leave the householder to fashion his
house and garden after his own desire.
Such in the very broadest terms is the character of the world
commonweal towards which the modern imagination is moving, so far as
its direction and economic life are concerned. The organisation of
collective bodies capable of exercising these wider proprietorships
which cannot be properly used in the common interest by uncorrelated
individual owners, is the positive practical problem before the
intelligent portion of mankind to-day. The nature of such collective
bodies is still a series of open questions, even upon such points as
whether they will be elected bodies or groups deriving their authority
from other sanctions. Their scope and methods of operation, their
relations to one another and to the central bureau of intelligence,
remain also to be defined. But before we conclude this essay we may be
able to find precisions for at least the beginning of such definition.
Nineteenth-century socialism in its various forms, including the
indurated formulæ of communism, has been a series of projects for
the establishment of such collective controls, for the most part
very sketchy projects from which the necessary factor of a sound
psychological analysis was almost completely wanting. Primarily
movements of protest and revolt against the blazing injustices arising
out of the selfishly individualistic exploitation of the new and
more productive technical and financial methods of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, they have been apt to go beyond the limits
of reasonable socialisation in their demands and to minimise absurdly
the difficulties and dangers of collective control. Indignation and
impatience were their ruling moods and if they constructed little they
exposed much. We are better able to measure the magnitude of the task
before us because of the clearances and lessons achieved by these
pioneer movements.
_Chapter VII_