Facts brought to light in the sphere of industry have an application in
politics, so to politics and the arts of government let us turn. Let
politicians consider, for example, the discovery that the incidence
of shell-shock in war, and of nervous disorders in peace, is highest
in the dangerous occupations which are also the occupations most
liable to industrial unrest. Such facts prevent us from viewing the
discontented worker either as a martyred idealist, or as a mere
criminal. The case is paralleled by the suggestion that desertion and
malingering in exhausted armies are symptoms or ‘defence reactions’ in
incipient shell-shock. They force upon us a more dispassionate and
a more therapeutic point of view. The criminal in general is coming
to be regarded in this light. Turn now to the anarchist, and the
psycho-analyst explains to you that his activities are minor symptoms
of his ‘father complex’, which imprisonment, for example, will merely
intensify.
From knowledge of the conditions of these things proceeds control.
Possibly punitive measures may be genuinely counteracting causes.
Perhaps, however, empirical science may declare that the best treatment
for an anarchist is to make him a Lord Mayor, and the best remedy for
a militant labour party is a term of office judiciously supervised by
our permanent officials. The future student of social affairs will be
preoccupied with the scientific investigation of the sources of power
and its social reservoirs. The ‘party in power’, as it is charitably
called, has not much of it. Public opinion seems to have much more. In
fact, the chief function of a government, now-a-days, seems to be that
of carrying out the programme of the opposition.[6] The opposition is
relatively free from criticism; the Government moves in dread of it,
being threatened by attrition in its bye-elections and by a general
landslide at any appeal to the country.
[6] We have recently witnessed a paralysed Labour Government
incapable of carrying out its projected remedies for industrial
ills, and a Conservative Government maintaining a system of
Free Trade.
Under such conditions the essential tasks of government are very much
the same of whatever political colour the party in power may be. First
and foremost it has to deal with emergencies, whether spontaneously
arising or organized by the opposition, in such a way as to preserve
its popularity with the public. It has also to carry out more or less
efficiently the routine work of government, and it has to prepare for
the next election by enshrining its most permanent tactical advantages
within the framework of the Constitution. Any time and energy that may
be left can be devoted to carrying out its ‘programme’ and in dealing
with what it conceives to be the fundamental disorders of society.
A ‘party programme’, like a dream, has a manifest and a latent
content. The manifest content is drawn from the incidents of the
day and popular demands. The latent is constituted by those deeper
policies for the furtherance of which this clap-trap may be closed. The
distinction between the manifest and the latent content is not due,
as is frequently asserted, to mere political dishonesty but to the
necessities of the case; the primitive group mind’s need of a ‘Cause’
and of an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual economic
doctrine. With the increased complexity and scientific character
which the latent content is, in future, likely to assume political
sacramentalism will become more and more important.
How will this affect the issue of our present discontents? Viewing the
situation frankly, we find in society two powerful and opposed forces.
Let us adopt the convenient labels and call them Capital and Labour.
It would take us too far afield to discuss in detail the prospects of
success in each of the various remedies suggested for their enmity.
In general, it seems to me that all the proposals depend for their
success upon large-scale persuasion, and ignore the fundamental causes
of unrest and conflict. Even labour, it seems to me, is mistaken about
the causes of its troubles, and labour might be expected to know them
best. But even to ask this would be as unreasonable as to ask a patient
to diagnose and prescribe for his own disease. The solution, I venture
to think, will come along the lines upon which the only solution of
any problem has ever before been found――along the lines of exact and
scientific thought and piecemeal investigation. The recognition of
this combined with attention to the apparent power of public opinion
in modern politics has led many to suppose that the ultimate remedy
lies in the dissemination of education, of exact and scientific
thought throughout our great democracies. But, personally, I doubt
the possibility of disseminating anything, least of all scientific
habits or attitudes of mind. It would seem to violate the rule of
differentiation. Nor can I bring myself to believe that there ever
was or is ever likely to be a democracy in any important sense. It is
sufficient if this scientific spirit be exploited by those who hold
the reins of power, and it is because it seems that they are beginning
to see the possibilities of this that I think the really significant
revolution is to come. What is called ‘Public Opinion’ is now-a-days a
carefully manufactured article produced by firms entirely outside the
scope of the Factory Acts. Of course, even a despotism is a ‘democracy’
in the unimportant sense that the despot’s rule depends upon a certain
kind of consent. What has happened lately is that a new kind of leader
has been evolved. The old leader ruled by certain kind of obvious
strength. The new ruler practices an art. He is moreover, a student of
the science of persuasion. He appeals through various media directly
to the masses, and does not so much inspire confidence as suggest that
he is only a more articulate spokesman of their will. The contrast
is rather like that between coercion and hypnotism, two obvious ways
of making people do as you wish; and the transition from one to the
other does not seem to me to be adequately described as a passage to
democracy.
The future, it seems, will see these powers scientifically employed.
Much has been learnt by crude empirical methods. The newspapers, the
advertising agencies, and the publicity departments have a store of
knowledge upon which politicians are wisely beginning to draw. Soon
they may attend to Mr Bertrand Russell, who in his prophetic volume,
foresees the development of glandular psychology. We know that by
suitable injections a person’s emotional mood can be changed, and
Russell suggests that a simple operation like compulsory vaccination
will convert the reddest Bolshevic to the temperament of the mildest
curate. The glands of docility will be under government control.
The suggestion appears to me to be over-simple, and to belong to
the mechanistic type of prophecy. Its supreme simplicity is in this
connection its supreme defect. The only defence against democracy is a
complicated mode of government. If methods of government are foolproof
then any one can practice it; and a sudden _coup d’état_, or an
invasion of half-a-dozen uninoculated savages, would be an irrevocable
disaster.
It is, I think, mainly through the development of scientifically
conducted propaganda that the world may one day see the abandonment of
force. No wholesale change of heart will be involved. It will simply be
that a more efficient weapon will have been discovered, a weapon that
is preventive as well as corrective in its use.
The military mind is, it is generally agreed, conservative to the verge
of sheer stupidity, but even the military mind is becoming infected
with the new ideas. Under the influence of Captain Liddel Hart, the
military representative of the prophetic school with which we are
concerned, it will surely come to recognize “the moral objective of
war.”[7] Even this author is conservative, in regarding tanks and
aeroplanes as being the principal weapons of the future. With regard
to the immediate future he may be right. But the implication of his
general thesis is that all these weapons will ultimately give place to
subtler ones of psychological design. Hardly less effective than the
‘death ray’ in bending the enemy’s will is the rumour that one has been
invented. And rumours can be invented daily in His Majesty’s Office
of Propaganda. And why stop at the control of fear? Why not apply
psychology throughout the whole of the enemy’s mental life? Perhaps,
in the last of all wars to end war, victory will fall to the side
which first makes its enemy laugh. The power of a sense of humour, at
any rate, is a terrible weapon in the negotiation of peace. Our late
enemies would scarcely have fared so badly had they been less sparingly
endowed with it in war.
[7] See _Paris, or the Future of War_.
Humour has its applications in peace as in war. Under universal
Scientific Management, the Government will vie with the underground
railways for the control of public laughter. The Catholic Church, in
enlisting the aid of Chesterton and Ronald Knox against its irrefutable
but dreary adversaries, has for once in modern history placed itself in
the vanguard of a winning cause.
The weapon has curious possibilities, but is one difficult to employ.
Quick wits sensitive to the trend of fashion are the essential
qualifications for a Minister of Public Humour. For the joke is the
most ephemeral of all works of art. It takes years of patient research,
now, to see the jokes of classical antiquity, and pages of solemn
argument to defend the taste of Shakespeare in his humour. Differences
of humour separate age from age and class from class. It is the weakest
link which binds the intellectuals to the cause of labour. One might
expect this weapon to favour established institutions, for only the
fat and prosperous can laugh with merriment, but by the same token the
jokes of Marie Antoinette were unintelligible to the hungry. Therefore
the lean and plodding journalists will come into their own and take
their place among the expert advisors to the future Ministry of Talents.