of More and Babbitt. Humanitarianism, they repeat, is a menace because
in its fatuous hope of a brotherhood of man without a prior discipline
of man’s egoistic impulses, it leads directly to the shambles and the
rise of a bloodstained dictator. Making light of the obstacles in
its path, humanitarianism, when the obstacles will not vanish at the
outflowing of sympathy, loses its head and massacres. But it is not
in the least implied that Sorel, the enemy of Rousseauism, was on his
positive side humanistic. Quite the reverse: he rejected the method of
the golden mean, and for reasons that have some weight. The following
paragraph will serve as his criticism of American Humanism, prepared
years in advance of its full emergence.
“The ideas held by modern ethical writers are drawn mainly from those
of Greece in its time of decadence; Aristotle, living in a period of
transition, combined ancient values with values that, as time went
on, were to prevail; war and production had ceased to occupy the
attention of the most distinguished men of the towns, who sought, on
the contrary, to secure an easy existence for themselves; the most
important thing was the establishment of friendly relations between
the better educated men of the community, and the fundamental maxim
was that of the golden mean. The new morality was to be acquired
principally by means of the habits which the young Greek would pick up
in mixing with cultivated people. It may be said here we are on the
level of an ethic adapted to consumers; it is not astonishing then that
Catholic theologians still find Aristotle’s ethics an excellent one,
for they themselves take the consumer’s point of view.”
Sorel, as a matter of fact, had a vestige of the classical religious
spirit and not the humanistic temper at all. He was an absolutist in
ethics. He was a pessimist, convinced of social determinism, which he
compared to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and convinced of
the wretchedness of man, or one might say, original sin. The march to
deliverance he said was narrowly conditioned by these two: the iron
laws of social determinism and the weakness of man. Yet he believed in
“a _secret virtue_ which assures the continued progress of the world”
and defined it as “this striving towards perfection which manifests
itself, in spite of the absence of any personal, immediate, and
proportional reward.”
Thus, he tried to root the syndicalist movement in a classical
pessimistic conception of man and to identify the growth of the
movement with the regeneration of the world. His finest stroke was
his method for rousing the group of sentiments necessary for the
regeneration: the sentiments of disinterestedness, heroism, glory, and
even sublimity. It was the method of the myth, from which incidentally
the New Humanists might learn something, it seems to me, which
would give a real driving emotional power to their campaign. What
that something is has already been suggested in the chapter on _The
Classical Revival Abroad_.
Sorel advocated the myth of the general strike. Just as the early
Christians had looked forward to an Apocalypse, had prepared themselves
rigorously for it, had shown the most heroic qualities in enduring
persecution, so, Sorel argued, the proletariat should look forward
always to a decisive Napoleonic battle, a social catastrophe for which
every least action was a preparation, and they should understand what
the function of violence is, namely, to keep perfectly clear the
grandiose outline of the class struggle. Into the criticism of this we
need not venture. It should be noted, however, that Sorel explained
carefully that “myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions
of determinations to act.” And finally, mention should be made of his
view that the bourgeoisie must keep up its warlike morale. He felt it
essential for the future success of civilization that the proletariat
should take over a vigorous, and not a decadent, system of capitalist
production. No doubt this idea was one of the factors of his popularity
with the group around Charles Maurras.
My treatment of Sorel, I am aware, is too scanty to serve as an
introduction to his ideas, and at the same time perhaps too long for
the purpose now, which is simply to suggest by referring to Sorel
that the good man of Rousseau and the Marxian revolutionist are not
inseparable companions. Sorel made a new coupling, the Homeric hero and
the social revolutionist, a combination that I happen to think would
bode better for the future.
Reverting to our proper topic, the question is: can Humanism and the
revolutionary movement join hands? Extremely unlikely, of course,
and yet I can conceive of a Humanist revolutionary. He would have
convinced himself that in the clash on first principles of political
economy (between first principles there can be no mediation) the
revolutionaries were right, and he would therefore oppose the forces
of capitalism as strongly as More opposes socialism. But in any
revolutionary party he joined, he would have an Augean stable of
illusions to clear out before he could satisfy himself that the
revolutionists could really fulfil their pledges of a better society.
He would have to persuade his comrades to throw out the accumulated
rubbish of humanitarianism, the naïve notions of the goodness at heart
of the proletarian, the intellectual fallacies, the spilth of feeling
that you will find rampant in a writer like Upton Sinclair. This
clearing away of sloppy sentiment and fuzzy ideas would be of enormous
advantage to the revolutionary movement, but, as I say, it is extremely
unlikely that a Humanist Hercules will rise to perform it. Sooner or
later the technique of mediation would, in all probability, be put to
such a strain that it would be relegated to a secondary place, and our
hypothetical humanistic revolutionist would make foremost the method of
the myth or some other disciplinary conception. When that happened, he
might retain humanistic elements in his life, but he would cease to be
a Humanist in the Babbittean sense.
There is, however, much of a medicinal nature that the best minds among
our social revolutionaries can absorb from their opponents, More and
Babbitt, without undergoing conversion to conservatism. Let us hope
that the bitter taste will not deter them. For they will be better off
in respect to background, values and psychological interpretation of
man than before.
* * * * *
After all, Sorelism in the United States is a matter of academic
interest. Extremists of the left constitute a negligible and senseless
group, and the moderate socialists are pitifully weak. The liberals?
Bankrupt in ideas; seemingly ineffective in political action; decadent
in morale if one may judge by the slackness of the men being groomed to
follow the generation of Croly, Lovett, Villard and Alvin Johnson. As
for the labor movement in general, is it not the despair of Communist,
Socialist and Liberal alike? Inaccessible to ideas, unrebellious,
shortsighted, what can be hoped from the American Federation of Labor
other than a perpetual seesaw battle for higher wages and shorter
hours? The Wandering Jew, Daniel Halévy told Sorel, may be taken as
a symbol of the highest aspirations of mankind, condemned as he is
to march for ever without knowing rest. But there is naught of the
Wandering Jew about the groups just mentioned, and a Sorelist among
them would wear his heart out in the attempt to convey a sublime
vision of future ethics.
For contrast, we may turn to Babbitt’s political theorizing in
_Democracy and Leadership_, which has been called without exaggeration
perhaps the weightiest book in its field written by an American.
“When studied with any degree of thoroughness,” writes Babbitt in his
introduction, “the economic problem will be found to run into the
political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical
problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly
bound up at last with the religious problem.” The order is correct.
But although Babbitt thinks more coolly and, I suspect, with greater
ease on politics and economics than More, he too is least satisfactory
in economics: his treatment of that science is almost incidental and
certainly slighting. In the opinion of many, this will not do.
Let us unearth what there is of Babbitt’s thought on the economic
problem. He rightly criticizes unorthodox political economy for its
purely quantitative view of work. True enough, as he notes, orthodox
political economy prepared the way for this view: Locke practically
identified work with physical effort and made it the sole legitimate
source of property, and Adam Smith tended to a similar conception of
work in relation to property. But the Marxist, according to Babbitt,
fell into the deeper fallacy of identifying work with value. Babbitt
then proceeds to discriminate among physical work, mental working on
the material order, and ethical work on oneself.
The discrimination is valid, but in making it Babbitt seems to accept
the interpretations of orthodox political economy. Value, he appears
to hold, is largely determined by the law of supply and demand and by
competition. He notes that “as a result of the concentrated mental
effort of the gifted few, an effort displayed either in invention or
else in organization and management, the common laborer may today enjoy
comforts that were out of the reach even of the opulent only two or
three generations ago,” and he adds the laborer “should be the first
to recognize that exceptional capacity should receive exceptional
rewards.” Quite a point is made of competition. “Above all, social
justice is likely to be unsound in its partial or total suppression
of competition. Without competition it is impossible that the ends of
true justice should be fulfilled, namely, that every man should receive
according to his works.... The remedy for the evils of competition is
found in the moderation and magnanimity of the strong and successful,
and not in any sickly sentimentalizing over the lot of the under dog.”
But surely Babbitt knows the arguments against each of these points,
and my regret is that he did not, while making his defence of the
established economic order, deal closely with the specific arguments
against it. Let me cite some of these which seem to necessitate
refutation if one is to defend with a good intellectual conscience the
existing system. The Law of Supply and Demand (or L. S. D. for short)
has absolutely no weight outside the market: it is concerned only with
the relations of Sellers and Buyers, Supply being the abstraction of
all the Sellers and Demand the abstraction of all the Buyers. _Outside
the market_ what happens? “In all transactions between friends, between
members of the same family, between Governments and their servants, in
public services, and in all institutions run socially or by gentlemen,
L. S. D. is kicked out of doors and the Rule of Supply and Need takes
its place,” says Orage in _An Alphabet of Economics_. Again, I should
say Babbitt does not separate Capitalists and Management as he ought
to, when he speaks of the gifted minority to whom the workman owes
his increase in comfort (by the way, is increased comfort a relevant
argument?). Laborers are responsible to Management and must always be.
Management today is responsible to the Capitalist, but must it always
be? That is the question of moment to those who speculate about a new
industrial synthesis. As for the competition extolled by Babbitt,
that has to do with the price system which, it is a commonplace, is
superimposed on the productive system. We may profitably hear from
Orage again. “Production concerns values; competition concerns prices.
From production to competition is a transition from value-creating
to price-fixing; and the competitive system is one in which prices
are left to be decided by the play of the market.... Essentially
Competition is sale by auction, and usually without reserve.” A reserve
price being impossible for perishable commodities, “Competition is thus
all in favor of nonperishable commodities (Capital in particular); but
it is all against perishable commodities, and Labor in particular.”
Under those conditions one may have a feeling for the under dog whose
energy and skill are perishable that cannot fairly be described as
sickly sentimentality. That in his plight the under dog should have to
hear so much about the bracing effects of keen competition for him in
industrial society--this is adding mockery to injury.
My own view is that capitalism cannot be whitewashed, and for the
reason that it is founded on only a comparatively narrow portion of
human psychology. It is a function of Practical Man or Instinctive
Man: it enormously stimulates greed and virtually debars the entrance
of any generous motive. It is guaranteed to make men acquisitive but
not magnanimous. For my life, I cannot see how it can admit within
itself any forces of regeneration. Unsound in theory, tending always
to be swindling and ruthless, it manages to work, but only after a
fashion that can satisfy no one but a very small class of profiteers.
There are plenty to make emotional protests against this state of
economic affairs but we ought to supplement them with hard practical
criticism. For that let us go to a quarter not tinged with Bolshevik
or anti-capitalist sentiment: let us resort to the advocates of the
highly interesting Douglas Social Credit Plan in England. They point
out that the purpose of an economic system is to produce as much as
possible and to get the things produced into the hands of consumers.
If we are producing at our maximum, and there is not enough to go
around, that is, if only a proportion of the potential consumers can
be satisfied, then there is nothing more to say from the economic
viewpoint. Suffering from unsatisfied need is irrelevant to the
economist if maximum production can provide for only fifty per
cent, let us say, of our population. But the fact is that we produce
nowhere near our maximum, not even in wartime when production speeds
up enormously. Limited or falling production, say the Douglas people,
is only a specter: nothing more. Hence, it follows that the present
system is criticized in the most damaging way by two undoubted facts:
(1) the presence of poverty on a large scale, that is the presence
of hordes of potential consumers who cannot acquire commodities, and
(2) by unemployment, which as I write is estimated at from three
millions to eight millions in our country, unemployment meaning unused
producing ability. We can produce more, immensely more than we do:
witness the fact of unemployment. We can consume far more: witness the
fact of poverty. Understand this, and you have some idea of the sheer
inefficiency of the established system. One important qualification
must be added: the Social Credit people find the source of the trouble
not in private ownership of the tools of production or in unequal
distribution but in the money industry, in the financial system, which
is what they propose to reform.
I have gone into details of criticism in order to show that the New
Humanists are fairly caught on the capital charge of _failing to
recognize the economic problem_. However sensitive they may be to the
“excesses” of capitalism, they accept it and the financial system
with it as the defensible status quo, and with no great marshalling
of reasons either. I would urge on them, not any one of the proposed
solutions current, but the adoption of the mood and temper appropriate
to a baffling problem whose dimensions cannot be ignored. The case as
I diagnose it is similar to that in which the modern man finds himself
put in respect to science. The case calls for an awakened curiosity,
earnest search for solutions, the keenest criticism of both the status
quo and new theories, the cultivation of impartiality. I should like to
see the New Humanists with their background of ideas, their equipment
for criticism, their breadth of vision, convert themselves into eager,
impartial students of our common economic problems. I find them to
be not free-ranging students in this field, but tied uncritically
to the existing industrial order, an order furthermore that has had
a comparatively brief historical existence. But why should they not
become our best critics of economic questions, uniting general culture
to familiarity with the special science of production?
What we need stands out with absolute clarity: a livelier research into
the alternatives to or revisions of capitalism and a livelier criticism
of these alternatives or revisions. Many American intellectuals at
the present moment, discouraged with democracy, think of only two
alternative possibilities, Bolshevism and Fascism, each, I may say,
being abhorrent to the New Humanist. For the American Humanist appears
to commit himself completely to the democratic experiment, and to have
more respect for the old ideas of democracy than you usually encounter
nowadays in our disillusioned intelligentsia. But what vitiates
democracy so terribly that it becomes a pretended thing? Profiteer
economics. On the other hand, in the case of Bolshevism as in the case
of Fascism, democracy disappears; individualism goes down to defeat
before the dictatorship. If we would retain democracy then, the fact
not the pretence, we must revise the economics associated with it,
and that perhaps is possible. At any rate, we have not exhausted all
the alternatives even in speculating about revision. We have not even
assembled all of them before us for study and discussion.
The proof of this is our ignorance of the dazzling Social Credit
Plan of Major C. H. Douglas, which I mentioned above. Agitated for
in England ever since the Great War, it has yet failed to cross the
Atlantic, or rather one has to use a high-powered microscope to see the
few American students of it. This is easily explainable, however, since
with justice Major Douglas has been called the Einstein of economics,
and a considerable amount of free brain, of unmortgaged intellectual
energy, must be expended to grasp his novel and yet non-revolutionary,
non-confiscatory scheme of reform. Although I know it is impossible
to understand his proposal from the germ, I yet will give the
germ-proposition on the chance that it will pique the curiosity of
those rare readers who can detect even in the germ the presence of a
new principle that promises to be worth study. The gist of his proposal
is simply to regulate prices by productivity, by relation, that is,
to supply. I will add that the Douglas criticism of Marxian economics
is that it confuses ownership with control. We must look, not to
ownership, but to the financial system for the real control that is
exercised today over industry. Has Major Douglas, as it is claimed,
reached the bottom of economics?
I think the New Humanists should be interested in the question, and
if they should, they would certainly steal a march on that portion
of intellectual America which prides itself on its vigilance for new
ideas, but which to some of us often appears a little sluggish in
living up to its boast. Perhaps in the Social Credit Plan the Humanists
would discover not only the key economic theory, but a theory which
when applied would make their politics entirely feasible. For the Plan
alters nothing but the financial system.
We have all seen what one writer calls the degeneration of government
from a plane of democratic idealism and tolerable administration to a
plane of control by political machines, ward-bosses and racketeers, and
seeing it a great many intellectuals have given up hope of democracy,
have ceased to be even interested in it. But this writer, Jean Toomer,
goes on to speak for a larger mass of our citizens when he notes that
“there is still enough idealism left in us, there is still active in us
a sense of decency sufficiently strong to make us feel unhappy about
this trend. We cannot laugh at it or shrug our shoulders and play the
game ... there still exists in most of us a fairly strong wish to see
the American political experiment turn out well; and for this reason
we ask of a political writer that he show a degree of resistance to
political rottenness, a degree of insistence on decency, ability,
and intelligence in politics.” Babbitt’s _Democracy and Leadership_,
the supreme Humanist treatise on American political thought, was
written not for futilitarians or cynics but precisely for the mass of
intelligent citizens described by Toomer who wish to see democracy
turn out well. The baldest of summaries must here suffice for a work
that should have given rise to a whole literature of commentary.
_Democracy and Leadership_ studies types of political thinking from
Aristotle to Woodrow Wilson, with special attention given to the
naturalistic imperialism of Machiavelli, the idyllic imagination of
Rousseau when it dreams on politics, and the moral imagination of
Edmund Burke. Like More, Babbitt leans heavily upon Burke’s ideas
of a natural aristocracy, the power of example, and the imaginative
justification of privileges.
One of the strongest features of the book is its study of the humility
of Asia expressed in Buddhism and Confucianism. The West learned
sufficiently the lesson of self-reliance in the Renascence, but it has
not learned the lesson of humility, and from the Babbittean standpoint
this is essential.
A very brief description of Babbitt as a political thinker would note
first that he is an anti-imperialist as well as an anti-Bolshevist.
He is in fact an old-fashioned democrat who thinks that whatever the
quantitative achievements of the United States have been, qualitatively
we have thus far failed. He opposes the Jeffersonian tradition and
regrets the victory of Andrew Jackson. His tradition is strongly
unionist. Washington, John Marshall, Lincoln, the last viewed as a
unionist rather than an emancipator--these are the principal figures
in his democratic tradition. It is perhaps not too much to say that
Babbitt considers the Declaration of Independence a Rousseauistic
document and the Constitution a humanistic document. At any rate, he
makes much of the Supreme Court as a check on the spontaneous popular
will and stands firmly for constitutional democracy as against direct
democracy.
His program? The formation of a Socratic remnant. We need a movement,
he says, in our political life which will be Socratic, Aristotelian and
Christian, a movement, that is, that will stress definition, habit and
humility. The beginning is to subject our catchwords--the political
terms that sway our imaginations and actions--to a Socratic dichotomy,
and in this book Babbitt himself performs some masterly dichotomizing
of such infectious words as “service,” “liberty” and “imagination.”
The Aristotelian phase of the program is education along the lines we
observed in our last chapter. The Christian phase has to do with the
recovery of humility.
It is evident, I think, even from the bare outline how Babbitt runs
the political problem into the philosophical and religious problems.
Where one boggles is at the very beginning, the economic problem as it
merges into the political. That is, Babbitt’s politics has to compete
with his economics, and at the present time economics in practice is
the determinant. As in the case of More, Babbitt is most convincing
in dealing with Man Psychologic, least convincing in handling Man
Economic. His enemies, I may add, are most persuasive about Man
Economic and least equipped to study Man Psychologic.
The economics of commercial men (the science, that is, of production
for profit, not the science of production for use) puts the whole
question of right relations between man and man far up in the air.
We can theorize about these relations as much as we like but when we
drop to earth again, present economic habits spoil the theories. There
is, for instance, nothing in the least degree Utopian about Babbitt’s
politics. He is thoroughly realistic in his political vein, but all
the time he is working in that vein he presupposes not a reform of the
economics of commercial men but an amenability on the part of this
black economics to his theory of democracy.