THRASYMACHUS
THRASYMACHUS
OR
The Future of Morals
BY
C. E. M. JOAD
[Illustration]
New York
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright 1926
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
_First Printing_ _December, 1925_
_Second Printing_ _March, 1926_
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. MORALITY AS THE INTEREST OF THE STRONGER 1
II. HERD MORALITY AND THE NEW TYRANNY OF THOUGHT 13
III. THE NEW LIBERTY OF ACTION 37
IV. THE COMING CLASH 57
THRASYMACHUS
CHAPTER I
MORALITY AS THE INTEREST OF THE STRONGER
Thrasymachus appears in the first book of Plato’s _Republic_, in
which the speakers discuss the nature of Justice. Several tentative
definitions of Justice are given, which Socrates has no difficulty
in showing to be inadequate by the peculiarly irritating methods
of dialectic for which the Athenians so excusably poisoned him.
Thrasymachus then breaks in. He is a blustering, overbearing personage,
who makes long speeches instead of answering Socrates’ questions, and,
when driven into a corner, charges the latter rather irrelevantly with
having a bad cold and omitting to use his handkerchief.
Required to sustain an unpopular thesis, he is not unnaturally
represented as an offensive person. The trick is an old one and argues
well for Plato’s sense of dramatic fitness. It should not, however,
blind us to the plausibility of Thrasymachus’ position. Justice, he
says, is the interest of the stronger. Asked how he maintains this
view, he points out that the stronger control the government and make
the laws. These laws are not unnaturally made in their own interest;
in other words, matters are so contrived that, by the mere process of
obeying the laws, citizens are led to further the interests of those
who govern them. Morality, which is the name we give to law-abiding
conduct, is, therefore, a device on the part of the rulers to ensure
subservience and contentment on the part of their subjects. Since
subservient subjects are a joy and a credit to intelligent rulers, we
may say that justice, and indeed morality in general, is the interest
of the stronger.
The view that morality is unnatural to human beings and is imposed
by law in the teeth of primitive instincts which are fundamentally
non-moral, recurs at pretty regular intervals throughout the recorded
history of what passes for human thought. It rests upon what is called
the social contract theory of society, and leads to the conclusion that
human nature is fundamentally wicked.
The life of man in a state of nature was, as the philosopher Hobbes
tells us, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” His hand was
against his fellows and every man’s hand was against him. Men acted
offensively[1] towards each other as and when they pleased, and were
restrained by nothing but fear for their own safety. Finding this state
of affairs intolerable, men agreed to renounce their natural right to
act offensively towards their fellows on condition that their fellows
made a similar concession as regards themselves. The best thing of all,
of course, was to do what you liked to others without their having the
right to retaliate. Since this seemed impracticable, the next best
thing was to renounce the full liberty to do what one liked, seeing
that it was attended by the obviously unpleasant consequence to oneself
of a similar liberty in others, and to venture only upon those actions
that the law allowed. Society then was a _pis aller_. Your neighbour,
it was true, could not harm you, but then no longer could you work
your own sweet will upon your neighbour. Men lived at peace with one
another, not because they were naturally peaceable and law abiding, but
because they feared the consequences of being found out if they were
not. Once that fear of consequences was removed, they would revert to
their primitive, natural wickedness. Let a man, for example, learn how
to become invisible at will and, as Plato points out, no virgin would
be safe, no strong box unrifled. Man, then, is made moral by law; he is
not moral by nature.
[1] The term ‘acting offensively’ in this connection is used to cover
primitive conduct of the kind which is supposed to attract wicked
and violent men, as, for example, carrying off your neighbour’s
wife, raping his daughter, stealing his spoons, bashing in or
otherwise mutilating his face, and so forth.
Now the man who makes the laws is in one sense like the man who has
learnt how to become invisible. I do not mean that he can break the
laws with impunity, but he can see to it that he has no incentive to
break them. Thus we have the majestic impartiality of the modern law
which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep in doorways. He can also, as
Thrasymachus points out, ensure that, so long as others keep them, his
own power will be automatically safeguarded. And, since the law is at
once the prop and the mirror of the public opinion of the community,
and, since the public opinion of the community is in matters of conduct
at once the guardian and the arbiter of conventional morality, we may
further say that the habit of acting in a way of which the public
opinion of the community approves will be found to conduce to the
maintenance of the _status quo_, and hence to the interests of those
whom the _status quo_ suits.
In the early eighteenth century Bernard Mandeville revived and
elaborated the doctrine of Thrasymachus. Society was devised by
skilful politicians for their own advantage. This they hoped chiefly
to secure by the spread of what was called morality. Addressing
themselves, therefore, to men’s pride, they pointed out that man had
always considered himself to be superior to the brute beasts. Yet, if
he indulged his passions as soon as he conceived them and gave way
alike to sensual desire and violent rage, wherein did his superiority
consist? Surely in order to demonstrate their superiority men must
learn to master their appetites and restrain their passions. The plain
man listened to the words of the flatterer, and, aspiring to live
the higher life, transformed himself from a savage into a clerk. The
process is known as civilization.
Tamed by his own conceit, man was now fit to live in society. As a
social animal he regards as virtuous every action on the part of others
by which the society to which he belongs is benefited, and stigmatizes
as vicious the indulgence of private appetites irrespective of the
public good.
But the skilful politicians who had planned the thing from the
beginning had taken good care to ensure that the good of society
should be identical with their own advantage. Uncivilized man is
ungovernable man, but man tamed and tractable, with the bees of social
virtue and social service buzzing in his citizen’s bonnet, is at once
the prop and the dupe of unscrupulous governments. “From which”, as
Mandeville says, “it is evident that the first rudiments of morality
broached by skilful politicians to make men useful to each other as
well as tractable, were chiefly contrived that the ambitious might reap
the more benefit from, and govern vast numbers of them with the greater
ease and security.”
To those who object that morality was invented by God and not by
politicians, and that the sanctions of right conduct are derived not
from social utility but from divine ordinance, it should be observed
that God himself is the most potent instrument yet devised for securing
the performance of conduct beneficial to the stronger. This at least
is true of the great bulk of the gods who have figured in history.
On this point perhaps it would be best to let the stronger speak for
themselves. Napoleon may be taken as a suitable representative.
“What is it,” he writes, “that makes the poor man think it quite
natural that there are fires in my parlour while he is dying of cold?
That I have ten coats in my wardrobe while he goes naked? That at
each of my meals enough is served to feed his family for a week? It is
simply religion which tells him that in another life I shall be only
his equal, and that he actually has more chances of being happy there
than I. Yes, we must see to it that the floors of the churches are open
to all, and that it does not cost the poor man much to have prayers
said on his tomb.” Thenceforward, though an avowed free thinker,
Napoleon set his face sternly against anti-Christian and anti-clerical
legislation.
The moral is sufficiently obvious. Men whose lives are miserable
and oppressed will either rise in revolt against their misery and
servitude, or console themselves with the prospect of generous
compensation hereafter. If steps are taken to ensure that their faith
is sufficiently lively, they will look to the next world to supply
them with the divine equivalents of the champagne and cigars they are
missing in this one, an expectation which confers obvious advantages
upon those whom it enables to monopolize the champagne and cigars.
Tack on the further belief that riches and power in this world are the
best guarantees of torment and anguish in the next, and the utility
of religion to “the stronger” is sufficiently manifest. The parable
of the needle’s eye and the story of Lazarus have been responsible
for a political and social quietism among the many, which do credit to
the political acumen of the early governing class realists who slipped
them into the text of the New Testament; and whenever that quietism has
showed signs of giving, way, a religious revival or the endowment of a
church has usually been found the most effective method of dealing with
the situation.
“In 1818 one Englishman out of seven being at that time a pauper,
Parliament voted a million of public money for the construction of
churches to preach submission to the higher powers. In the debates in
the House of Lords, Lord Liverpool took occasion to lay stress on the
social importance of guiding by this means the opinions of the masses
who were for the first time beginning to receive education.”[2] God, it
seems, is cheaper than a living wage, and no less effective as a means
of securing social contentment.
[2] _The Town Labourer_, by J. L. and Barbara Hammond.
To its superior utility in this respect we must in part attribute the
success of Christianity. Of all religions known to man it lays the
greatest stress upon those virtues whose practice is advantageous to
the stronger. It glorifies weakness and sentimentalizes over failure;
its heaven is for the submissive and the inefficient; its hell for
the dominant and the proud. Just as the charitable worker takes the
revolutionary edge off poverty by distributing coal and blankets to
the victims of acute industrial distress, so the priest promotes
submissiveness by inculcating the duties of sobriety, meekness,
unselfishness, honesty, and contentment. These virtues make good
workmen and prosperous employers, and, if they are only developed
to a sufficient degree, will enable their fortunate possessors
cheerfully to put up with bad wages, long hours, wretched houses, and
social servitude. The contrary virtues of manliness, self-reliance
and independence springing from a spirit passionately resentful of
injustice, quick to resist an injury and idealistically determined to
make a better place of this world instead of waiting passively for the
next one, are discouraged as savouring of pride and self-sufficiency,
and as showing a reprehensible tendency to look for help to oneself
instead of to God, our helper in time of trouble. The rich, to be sure,
possess these virtues; but then the message of religion is _from_, not
_to_, the rich.
But Thrasymachus has yet one more observation to make to us before
we leave him to turn to the future. The penalty of law breaking on a
small scale is prison, and of trivial wickedness, social ostracism.
But what of law-breaking on a large scale, and a wickedness powerful
enough to flout the public opinion to which others succumb? These are
the qualities of the stronger and they reap the stronger’s reward. The
rebel is the patriot who fails, the patriot is the rebel who prevails.
This is the lesson of the past, and those who read it may learn that
if only they are strong enough to succeed, they need not trouble
themselves about the respectability of their credentials. Nor has the
position altered to-day. The man who steals a leg of mutton goes to
prison for a month; the captain of industry grown rich on the profits
stolen from his workmen gets a knighthood. The man who has murdered
the wife who has annoyed him gets hanged for his pains; the man who
kills his fellow men for nourishment is denounced as a cannibal; but
the great general who plans the death of vast multitudes of his fellows
whom he has never seen, with whom he has never exchanged a cross word
and whom he does not require for purposes of sustenance, is hailed as
the saviour of his country.
Thus those who commit injustice, yet have the wit or the good fortune
to escape the consequences of their actions, climb into the seats of
the stronger and share their immunity from moral restrictions. Since,
in the mere process of gratifying their tastes, they are enabled to
give employment to large bodies of their fellows, they are accounted
public benefactors whose wealth constitutes a social asset. And,
should vestiges of the morality of the weaker, from whose ranks they
have risen, assail them in the form of conscience, they discover that
even the gods can be squared and that a liberal support of deserving
charities, coupled with the occasional endowment of a church, are
calculated――so they are assured――to procure for them as honoured a
place in the hereafter as their own successful injustice has obtained
for them in the present.
Thus Thrasymachus’ phrase “morality is the interest of the stronger”
has a double significance. In the first place, it defines the morality
of the many as that kind of conduct which promotes the interest of the
few; in the second, it assures to the successful few the honourable
reputation, the social consideration and the good repute among their
fellows, which are commonly supposed to be the rewards of morality.