THE NEED OF DIVERSITY.
A large part of the aims of government in all ages has been the
securing of uniformity, and much of the misery of mankind has been
caused by the enforcing of it. But when we look at nature we see that a
highly uniform species is the least likely to advance; and a seedsman
or a breeder will try to break up too uniform a strain by exciting
conditions which may lead to beneficial new varieties. It is only in a
fluctuating species in which new "sports" easily arise, or are quickly
developed by conditions, that we can expect to acquire new qualities or
beneficial advance.
It is therefore one of the essentials for an advancing species that it
should have full scope for diversity, so that any new varieties may not
be crushed out by a uniformity of conditions. Too uniform a type of
government is a deadly thing. Compulsory orthodoxy killed the vitality
of Spain, and—so far as it succeeded—that of France also. No state
was more brilliant or vigorous than the Norman rule in Sicily, which
equally patronised Muhammedan and Christian.
Diversity may be secured in two ways, either by large varieties within
a single great state, or by differences between homogeneous small
states. The diversity within a large state may be seen in England or
America; diversity between small states was attained between the cities
of ancient Greece or mediaeval Italy.
But we meet with limiting conditions in the necessity of combination
for mutual support; and in small states that can be carried out by a
vigorous intolerance which weeds out those who are not conformable, and
drives them into more congenial communities. Intolerance, therefore, is
a gain to a small community, though detrimental to a large state where
it excludes the neighbourhood of variety.
In modern times it is with large states that we have mainly to deal.
They are a necessary development where communication is sufficiently
easy for the concentrated military pressure of the whole to be brought
to bear on a single point. If states are so small that concentration
on the border is too easy, the state will expand; if concentration is
difficult owing to size, the state will tend to fall apart again. The
size for states which is most successful is a function of the facility
of internal communication. Let those who deplore the absorption of
small states, and the growth of Imperialism in all countries, ponder
the tale of the North American Indians, who resented the power of the
white man, and considered how to rid themselves of him. Their great
council was rejoiced, when one sage said that if they would do as he
said, he would promise that no white man should remain. "If the white
man is to go you must give up all that he brought, the horse, the gun,
the blanket, the firewater; if you will do this you may be free." They
thought—and then said, "No, he must stay." So, if we are willing to
revert to nothing quicker than a cob, we might get back to a Heptarchy.
The modern condition of great states being therefore forced upon us by
the railway and telegraph, the only practical question is the form of
life in such communities. Uniformity that is enforced, either by law,
or by custom or fashion, is certainly a detriment, as it will suppress
the useful variations when they arise. And the objection to it bursts
out in the form of anarchism, which is specially a disease of great
states. The amount of anarchism is very closely related to the size of
the state; and it is probably an exact measure of the internal strain
produced by repulsion of diverse types and the pressure needed to keep
them together.
It is only a very crude form of intolerance to expect many tens of
millions of people to agree in religion, morals, and government. A
degree of intolerance that may succeed, and even be useful, for some
thousands, will be disastrous if applied to as many millions of men.
But here we run against another guiding principle of many people. It
is often assumed that possibly in government, probably in religion,
and certainly in morals, there is an absolute standard of right and
wrong, immutable and irremovable. To take the last subject—that of
morals—to the utilitarian they are the conditions for the well-being
of society, and may vary indefinitely with the variations of society,
and he recognises that there is perhaps no action which may not belong
to the best code of morality for certain possible conditions. To the
theologian morals are the Divine dictates, which have varied immensely
under different dispensations; and the Patriarchal, early Jewish,
Prophetic, or Christian codes are represented as quite incompatible one
with another. The subjects of sister-marriage, concubinage of captives,
lapidation, private revenge, communal or individual responsibility,
and others, all show how entirely variable the presentation of the
moral standard is for different states of society. Hence we must always
regard any given moral standard as being rightly associated with some
particular condition of society and typical of it; much as the colour
of red heat, or yellow heat, or white heat, is typical of particular
temperatures. And instead of blindly reprobating those among us who do
not conform to our present theoretical standard, or even the present
normal standard, we should regard them as fragments of a different
society gone astray in time or space.
Thus we see that diversity should be tolerated up to the limits
of the laws that are absolutely necessary to avoid confusion and
misunderstanding between members of the same community: and there is no
constraining principle which would narrow the variability allowable,
short of permitting injustice, hardship, or unfair competition between
those who need to work together in mutual confidence and good faith. It
may truly be said that civilisation is the means for giving scope to
diversity.
Under stagnant and uniform conditions there may be a fossilised form
of civilisation; but any living form must yield opportunities for
individual effort, and every such opportunity is the making or marring
of the man who rises to it or who falls before it. The leading
tenth and the submerged tenth are equally the proof that a living
civilisation is doing its work of sorting out the best and getting rid
of the worst stock.
From another point of view, toleration is essential to completion.
The enormous variety of character, and ability for special work, is
all needed in a complete community. There are many "wrong paradises"
in a whole society. We see the necessity for mental diversity, from
the pure mathematician who is proud of the inapplicability of his
results, through all the successive stages of research work, commercial
work, administrative management, and mechanical work, even down to
merely automatic work which needs no more mind than a cow's. And it
is perfectly clear that such mental diversity must have corresponding
variety of external life to accommodate it. The student or experimental
worker finds the disturbances of communal life almost insufferable,
while the mechanical worker would be miserable almost to suicide in
the silence and lack of excitement of a life devoted to abstract
thought or to millionths of an inch. If, therefore, the productions of
the externals of life differ so profoundly in a complete society, we
must expect and allow equally great differences in all the feelings,
instincts, and requirements. One man may have a physical repulsion
to affecting his mind and condition by stimulants and narcotics, a
repulsion that extends more or less to every one addicted to such
drugging of the senses. But it would be a misfortune to be without
that variety, and the world would be poorer by losing Falstaff, or
even Bardolph. The utmost we can say is that we should never be blind
to the bad effects on the community of a low type if it be too widely
diffused.
So long as the extreme parties are but a small portion, and the
distribution of variation is normal, most in the middle course and
thinning away to the upper and lower limits, the society is stable and
benefits by its variations. But if the curve of variation is irregular,
and shows two large groups with fewer in the middle course between
them, the condition is dangerous. We had such a condition in England
in the seventeenth century, and after a long struggle of each group
to capture the middle party, the separation into two communities took
place. The spiritual ancestors of Clifford and Perks and Byles were
happy in their paradise of intolerant puritanism in New England, while
Old England had internal peace for a couple of centuries. Another such
process of fission now seems growing imminent, and it is again the
question as to which group will capture the middle party. The positive
danger of a diversity running into two separate groups is notorious in
history. The Copts invited the Arab invasion to rid them of Byzantine
bondage; the Britons invited the Saxons to save them from their
neighbours. The ideals of a County Council which will not tolerate a
quiet square in London, or of labour members who promote marches of
the unemployed and unlimited taxation at their will, may drive the
best thought in England to the tranquillity of a well-governed capital
abroad; and as there are many people now who would prefer in England a
Boer domination to that of the party represented by Cecil, Halifax, and
Riley, so there are many others who would rather submit to a German
government of London than to a sacking by a hungry mob. The segregation
into two groups with an unstable link between them is fatal to the
virtues classed as Patriotism. A studious Englishman would sooner have
a Japanese or Russian professor for a neighbour, than have the average
drinking workman and rowdy family who may be his distant cousins. And
assuredly he would make no personal sacrifices to keep out of England
any people who were proved to be the moral or intellectual superiors of
the rest of his countrymen. We thus see that diversity, however great,
must vary about a single centre, if it is to be favourable to society
as a whole.
Looking at the general domination of modern law it is truly astonishing
how much uniformity is possible. But the fact of a uniform law being in
force must not blind us to the existence of a great amount of diversity
being now tolerated side by side with it. For instance, we are so
accustomed to think of only one type of marriage that the various
stages recognised in Roman law seem astonishing. Yet in legal status
in England there are ten stages surviving, most of which are tolerated
by the law. There is (1) royal assent, needful in the royal family,
just as it is needful in every family in some African communities; (2)
normal religious or civil marriage; (3) marriage of divorced persons,
only civil; (4) within prohibited degrees, but tolerated socially, as
deceased wife's sister, or (5) not tolerated, as uncle and niece; (6)
quasi-permanent connection with full legal responsibility for children;
(7) temporary license. Only in case of lack of full consent does the
law step in to punish, in (8) marriage under age, (9) bigamy or (10)
violence. Every one of these stages has been normal in some conditions
of society, and most are normal in some countries even at present. We
may, for example, instance (1) normal in Benin; (2) religious marriage
only normal in England; (3) normal in Eastern Europe; (4) normal in
our colonies; (5) normal in Italy; (6) normal in Islam; (7) normal in
Madagascar in interregnum of sovereignty, and in other countries; (8)
normal in India; (9) normal in Islam; (10) normal in most warfare.
And each of these stages carries with it in England different legal
and social conditions. Again, as regards the period of the marriage
ceremony, the Church has had a long and hard fight to get it recognised
as a hymeneal ceremony and not a maternity ceremony; yet the latter
status is recognised in law as equal to the former, and it is still
prevalent among a third of marriages in some Australian colonies, and
very largely in England, both in the country from end to end and in
town life. On the whole some fifteen hundred years of church pressure
has not turned the scale very far against the older custom, which we
might well call approximation by trial and error. Such is the diversity
which is yet uncontrolled.
We must regard society, therefore, as in the above definite subject,
in the light of a mixture of many stages of evolution. We may still
sit at table with palaeolithic man, put into modern dress and eating
modern dishes it is true, but absolutely in the palaeolithic stage of
thought and intellect; he is entirely absorbed in the interests of
hunting wild animals, and devoted to his appliances for the chase,
while incapable of making or improving anything belonging to a higher
kind of civilisation. Crime and illegalities are very largely merely
survivals of different conditions of society, which the law of the
majority has not succeeded in repressing. As such, the more reasonable
and favourable mode of dealing with them would be deportation to
communities where such actions are still normal. Instead of five years'
sentence for bigamy, let us exile a man to a Muhammedan country. If we
were seriously to establish island communities where theft, violence,
anarchy, and other phases incompatible with any passable diversity,
were still normal and unpunished, we might leave all those who
preferred to practise such conditions to work out their own life and
views with kindred minds.
Regarding now the individual rather than the community, we see in
modern education a very serious force acting against that diversity
which is needful for progress. So far as it is a social force, owing
to the herding together of large masses of children, and so destroying
family types, it is mainly deleterious. The enforcement of trivial
and senseless regulations by boys themselves is entirely a detriment
to character, as destroying a habit of dealing with matters on their
own merits, and creating a terrible bogey of senseless public opinion.
The compulsory games and the ordering of the use of personal time,
is another detriment, for it certainly destroys some ability which
might find its footing in the character permanently. But beside the
detriment of the system of herding, there is the more direct question
of the influence of the teaching. Most children begin with a great
curiosity concerning the world and their experience of it, a curiosity
which when unguided leads to many unpleasant and inconvenient results.
Hence, instead of guiding it aright, and encouraging the benefits of
it, the selfish and lazy plan of elders is to destroy and obliterate
the reasoning interest in things, and try to enforce in its place a
knowledge of matters, which are generally less useful, and certainly
less interesting, than those which a child wants to know about. The
leading factor of character, the acquisition of knowledge of benefits
and injuries, of good and of evil, is mainly rooted out; and the new
plants of abstract ideas and bookwork require generally many years to
take good root, if they do so at all. This system lies at the base of
the unintellectual character of the average educated Englishman, who
takes no useful interest in anything. As an example of this, there is
a foreign land full of interest, scientific, historical, and social;
for a quarter of a century hundreds of Englishmen have been there in
comfortable official positions with reasonable leisure. Yet there is
not a single good memoir produced, not even a hundred pages of original
matter, outside of official work, by all this mass of educated minds
during nearly a generation. The possibility of what might have been
done in such grand opportunities has been stamped out by the education
which they have suffered. They are all of regulation pattern, with as
little variation as is possible between different temperaments—amiable
upright men, who will leave no trace of anyone being the wiser in
future for their existence. Such is the product of the numbing chill of
uniformity, and the weeding out of the advancing power of diversity.
We are all familiar with the epigram of England having a hundred
religions but only one sauce; but we see a worse misfortune in the
absurd incongruity of now having two hundred religions and only one
system of elementary education. Amid the great variety of minds, which
is illustrated by the free choice of religious belief and practice,
we certainly require a great diversity of education to bring out the
best development of each type. We require simultaneous experiment on
a small scale, instead of vast experiments of Acts which apply to
the whole country for a generation at a time. Every Act is only an
experiment, and one which is usually spoiled by attempting too much
in a compromise, which is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. Had there
been in 1870 a hundred schools used for experiment, say five of twenty
different types in different parts of the country, the life-history
of the pupils would by now have given us a firm basis for rational
adjustment of a system. It is fatuous to suppose it possible to make
one Procrustean bed to fit children of the country, the mining centre,
the manufacturing district, the commercial town, or the fisher folk—of
the Yorkshire tyke, the Suffolk dumpling, or the Hampshire hog. Nor is
it merely the success of a system in producing examination results that
has to be attained. It is quite possible that the best workers in after
life may not be the best to cram with temporary bookwork. Nothing short
of twenty years of active life can test the value of the education on
which it is based.
Should we not at least try the effect of varying amount of control by
the central board, the local council, and the teacher himself? May
not some latitude in subject be allowed to a teacher, to follow lines
which his own mind is best capable of making useful? Should not a great
difference be made between the town, where an infant school is needed,
to keep children safe while parents are at work, and the country where
they can be left to play in the open? Should not country teaching be
adapted to making agriculturists? Might it not be possible to leave
children entirely in the fields till sixteen, provided that they could
pass in reading at nine, and in figures at twelve, however it was
learned? A solid two years' half-timing from sixteen to eighteen, when
they valued knowledge, might be worth all they gain in the present
way. Such are a few of the questions to which answers are necessary,
before we can begin to provide for the diversity of education, which is
certainly requisite if we are to make it successful—a help instead of
a detriment in after life.
And in more detailed education is it not possible to let a child's mind
grow on what is of interest to it—to further it on whatever subjects
are most attractive and easy to that type of mind, until the habit of
learning is so developed that it can be more easily levelled up on
the subjects which have been neglected? The mere habit of learning
and applying knowledge has to be acquired to begin with, and surely
the easier subjects are the best on which to practise the power of
concentration of mind. The trainer knows that his monkeys cannot be
taught unless they can concentrate attention on the subject in hand.
In every direction we need to gain diversity—in types of society,
in customs, in varieties of mind; and to gain this basis for useful
variation we must begin by cultivating diversity and providing for its
success, in place of attacking and crushing it wherever it appears.