THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY.
SPECULATIVE ATTEMPTS TO MINIMISE IT
When socialism, says Mr. Sidney Webb, shall have abolished all other
monopolies, there will still remain to be dealt with the most formidable
monopoly of all--namely, "the natural monopoly of business ability," or
"the special ability and energy with which some persons are born." The
services of these monopolists, he sees and fully admits, would be as
essential to a socialistic as they are to any other community which
desires to prosper according to modern standards. He sees and admits
also that these exceptional men will not continuously exert or even
develop their talents unless society can supply them with some adequate
motive or stimulus. Accordingly, since he maintains that no scheme of
society would be socialistic in any practical sense which did not
completely, or at least approximately, eliminate the motive mainly
operative among such men at present--namely, that supplied by the
possibility of exceptional economic gain--he fairly faces the fact that
some motive of a different kind will have to be discovered by socialists
which shall take the place of this.
I mention Mr. Webb in particular merely because he represents the views
which all intellectual socialists are coming to hold likewise. This
specific problem of how to provide the natural monopolists of business
ability with all adequate motive to develop and exercise their talents
is engaging more and more the attention of the higher socialistic
thinkers; and if we take together the passages in their writings which
deal with it, it has by this time a voluminous literature of its own.
We shall find that the arguments brought forward by them in this
connection divide themselves broadly into two classes, one of which
deals with the problem of motive directly, while the other class aims at
preparing the way to its solution by showing in advance that its
difficulties are far less formidable than they appear to be. Without
insisting on the manner in which they are urged by individual writers,
we will take these two classes of argument in the logical order which
they assume when we consider their general character.
These preparatory arguments, with which we will accordingly begin, while
admitting that some men are undoubtedly more able than others, aim at
showing that the superiority of such men to their fellows is not so
great as it seems to be, and that any claims made by them to exceptional
reward on account of it consequently tend to reduce themselves to very
modest proportions.
These arguments possess a peculiar interest owing to the fact that they
have not originated with socialistic thinkers at all, but have been
drawn by them from the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century
generally, in so far as it was applied to historical and sociological
questions. The dominant idea which distinguished this school of thought
was the insignificance of the individual as compared with society past
and present. Thus Herbert Spencer, who was its most systematic exponent,
opens his work on the _Study of Sociology_ with an elaborate attack on
what he calls "The Great Man Theory," according to which the explanation
of the main events of history is to be sought in the influence of
exceptional or great men--the men who, in vulgar language, are spoken of
as "historical characters." Such an explanation, said Spencer, is no
explanation at all. Great men, however great, are not isolated
phenomena. Whatever they may do as the "proximate initiators" of change,
they themselves "have their chief cause in the generations they have
descended from," and depend for the influence which is commonly
attributed to their actions, on "the multitudinous conditions" of the
generation to which they belong. Thus Laplace, he says, could not have
got far with his calculations if it had not been for the line of
mathematicians who went before him. Cæsar could not have got very far
with his conquests if a great military organisation had not been ready
to his hand; nor could Shakespeare have written his dramas if he had not
lived in a country already enriched with traditions and a highly
developed language.
But though it was Herbert Spencer who invested these arguments with
their most systematic form, and gave them their definite place in the
theory of evolution as a whole, they were widely diffused already among
his immediate predecessors, as we may see by the following passage taken
from an unlikely quarter. "It is," says Macaulay, in his _Essay on
Dryden_, anticipating the exact phraseology of Spencer, "the age that
makes the man, not the man that makes the age.... The inequalities of
the intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear
so small a proportion to the mass, that in calculating its great
revolutions they may safely be neglected." And Macaulay is merely
expressing a doctrine distinctive of his time--a doctrine which, to take
one further example, dominated in a notable way the entire thought of
Buckle. This doctrine, which, to a greater or less degree, merges the
organism in its environment, or the individual, however great, in
society, has been seized on by the more recent socialists just as the
theory of Ricardo, with regard to labour and value, was seized on by
Karl Marx, and has been adapted by them to their own purposes.
Thus Mr. Bellamy, whose book, _Looking Backward_, descriptive of a
socialistic Utopia, achieved a circulation beyond that of the most
popular novels, declares that "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of
the thousand of the produce of every man are the result of his social
inheritance and environment"; and Mr. Kidd, a socialist in sentiment if
not in definite theory, urges that the comparative insignificance, the
comparative commonness, and dependence for their efficiency on
contemporary social circumstances, of the talents which we are
accustomed to associate with the greatest inventions and discoveries, is
proved by the fact that some of the most important of these have been
made by persons who, "working quite independently, have arrived at like
results almost simultaneously. Thus rival and independent claims," he
proceeds, "have been made for the discovery of the differential
calculus, the invention of the steam-engine, the methods of spectrum
analysis, the telephone, the telegraph, as well as many other
discoveries." Further, to these arguments a yet more definite point has
been added by the contention that, as socialist writers put it,
"inventions and discoveries, when once made, become common property,"
the mass of mankind being cut off from the use of them only by patents
or other artificial restrictions.
The aim of socialists in pursuing this line of reasoning is obvious. It
is to demonstrate, or rather to suggest, that "the monopolists of
business ability," in spite of their comparative rarity and the
importance of the services performed by them, are far from being so
rare or so superior to the mass of their contemporaries as they seem to
be, that their achievements owe far more than appears on the surface to
the co-operation of the average members of society, and that
consequently a socialistic society could justly demand and practically
secure their services on far easier terms than those which they command
at present.
And to such a conclusion the principles of modern evolutionary
sociology, as unanimously interpreted by the philosophers of the
nineteenth century, may be fairly said to lend the entire weight of
their prestige. Let us, then, consider more carefully what these
principles are, with a view to understanding the true scope of their
significance. We shall find that, although undoubtedly true in
themselves, the scope of their significance has been very imperfectly
understood by the great thinkers to whose talents their elucidation has
been due; that these thinkers, in their eagerness to establish a new
truth, have at the same time introduced a new confusion; and that it is
from the confusion of a truth with a falsehood, rather than from the
truth itself, that the socialists of to-day have been here drawing their
inspiration.
The confusion in question arises from a failure to see that sociology is
concerned with two distinct sets of phenomena, or with one set regarded
from two absolutely distinct standpoints. Thus it is constantly said
that man, in the course of ages, has developed civilised societies and
the various arts of life--that, beginning as an animal only a little
higher than the monkey, he gradually became a builder of cities, a
master of the secrets of nature, a philosopher, a poet, a painter of
divine pictures. And from a certain point of view this language is
adequate. If what we desire to do is to estimate, as speculative
philosophers, the significance of the human race in relation to the
universe or its Author, by considering its origin on this planet, and
its subsequent fortunes hitherto, what interests us is man in the mass,
or societies, and not individuals. But if we are interested in any
problem of practical life--such, for example, as how to cure cancer, or
cut a navigable canal through a broad and mountainous isthmus, or
decorate a public building with a series of great frescoes--the central
point of interest is the individual and not society. How would a mother,
whose child was hovering between life and death, be comforted by the
information that man was a great physician? How would America be helped
in the construction of the Panama Canal by learning from sociologists
that man could remove mountains? How could great pictures be secured for
a public building by information to the effect that the greatest of all
great artists depended for their exceptional power on the aggregate of
conditions surrounding them, when ten millions of men whose surrounding
conditions were similar might be tried in succession without one being
found who rose in art above the level of vulgar mediocrity? It is not
that the generalisations of the evolutionary sociologists with regard
to man in the mass, or societies, are untrue philosophically.
Philosophically they are of the utmost moment. It is that they have no
bearing on the problems of contemporary life, and that they miss out the
one factor by which they are brought into connection with it.
Let us take, for example, the way in which Herbert Spencer illustrates
the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of
Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's debt to his times. "Given a Shakespeare,"
he says, "and what dramas could he have written without the
multitudinous conditions of civilised life around him--without the
various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth
to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had
developed and enriched by use?" The answer to this question is to be
found in the counter-question that is provoked by it. Given the
conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its
language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have
produced the Shakespearian dramas unless England had possessed an
individual citizen whose psycho-physical organisation was equal to that
of Shakespeare? Similarly, it is true that Turner could not have painted
his sunsets if multitudinous atmospheric conditions had not given him
sunsets to paint; but at the same time every one of Turner's
contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind,
and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his
own. The case of the writer and the artist, indeed, illustrates with
singular lucidity the fact which the philosophy of the evolutionary
sociologists ignores that the great man does great things, not in virtue
of conditions which he shares with the dullest and the feeblest of the
men around him, but in virtue of the manner in which his exceptional
genius assimilates the data of his environment, and gives them back to
the world, recombined, refashioned, and reinterpreted.
And with regard to practical matters, and more especially the modern
production of wealth, the case is just the same. No one has illustrated
more luminously than Herbert Spencer himself the multitudinous character
of the knowledge which modern production necessitates; and no one has
insisted with more emphasis than he that one of the rarest faculties to
be met with among human beings is the faculty, as he expresses it, of
"apprehending assembled propositions in their totality." It would be
difficult to define better in equally brief language the intellectual
aspect of that composite mental equipment which distinguishes from
ordinary men the monopolists of business ability. It is precisely by
apprehending a multitude of assembled propositions in their
totality--mathematical, chemical, geological, geographical, and so
forth--by combining them for a definite purpose, and translating them
into a series of orders which organised labour can execute, that the
intellect of the able man gives efficiency to the industrial processes
of to-day. In addition, moreover, to his purely intellectual faculties,
he requires others which, in their higher developments, are no less
rare--namely, a quick discernment of popular wants as they arise or an
imagination which enables him to anticipate them, an instinctive insight
into character which enables him to choose best men as his subordinates,
promptitude to seize on opportunities, courage which is the soul of
promptitude, and finally a driving energy by which the whole of his
moral and intellectual mechanism is actuated. As for "the aggregate of
conditions out of which he has arisen," or the aggregate of conditions
which surround him, these are common to him and to every one of his
fellow-countrymen. They are a landscape which surrounds them all. But
aggregates of conditions could no more produce the results of which, as
Herbert Spencer admits, the able man is the proximate cause, unless the
able man existed and could be induced to cause them, than a landscape
could be photographed without a lens or a camera, or a great picture of
it painted in the absence of a great artist.
Herbert Spencer, indeed, partially perceives all this himself. That is
to say, he realises from time to time that the causal importance of the
great man varies according to the nature of the problems in connection
with which we consider him and that while he is, for purposes of
general speculation, merely a transmitter of forces beyond and greater
than himself, he is for practical purposes an ultimate cause or fact.
That such is the case is shown in a curiously vivid way by two
references to two great men in particular, which occur not far from each
other in Spencer's _Study of Sociology_. One is a reference to the last
Napoleon, the other is a reference to the first. He refers to the former
when he is emphasising his main proposition, that the importance of the
ruler, considered as an individual, is small, and almost entirely merged
in the conditions of society generally. "If you wish," he says, "to
understand the phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it should
you read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on
record, down to Frederick the greedy and Louis Napoleon the
treacherous." When he makes his reference to Louis Napoleon's ancestor,
he is pausing for a moment in the course of his philosophical argument
in order to indulge in a parenthetical denunciation of war. Of the
insane folly of war, he says, we can have no better example than that
provided by Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
hardly a country was free from "slaughter, suffering, and devastation."
For what, he goes on to ask, was the cause of such wide-spread horrors?
Simply, he answers, the presence of one abnormal individual, "in whom
the instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified by what we
call moral sentiments"; and "all this slaughter, suffering, and
devastation" were, he says, "gone through because one man had a restless
desire to be despot over all men." Here we see how Spencer, as a matter
of common-sense, instinctively assigns to great men absolutely
contrasted positions, according to the point of view from which he is
himself regarding them--that of the speculative thinker and that of the
practical politician, and of this fact we will take one example more. Of
his doctrine that the great man is merely a "proximate initiator," and
in no true sense the cause of what he seems to produce or do, he gives
us an elaborate illustration taken from modern industry--that is to say,
the invention of the _Times_ printing-press. This wonderful piece of
mechanism would, he says, have been wholly impossible if it had not been
for a series of discoveries and inventions that had gone before it; and
having specified a multitude of these, winds up with a repetition of his
moral that of each invention individually the true cause is not the
so-called inventor, but "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has
arisen." But when elsewhere, in his treatise on _Social Statics_,
Spencer is dealing with the existing laws of England, he violently
attacks these, in so far as they relate to patents, because they fail,
he says, to recognise as absolute a man's "property in his own ideas,"
or, in other words, "his inventions, which he has wrought, as it were,
out of the very substance of his own mind." Thus Spencer himself, at
times, as these passages clearly show, sees that while great men, when
considered philosophically, do little of what they appear to do, they
must for practical purposes be dealt with as though they did all; though
he nowhere recognises this distinction formally, or accords it a
definite place in his general sociological system.[12]
The absurdity of confounding speculative sociology with practical is
shown with equal clearness by Macaulay in the passage that was just now
quoted from him. "The inequalities of the intellect," he says, "like the
inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to
the mass" that the sociologist may neglect the one just as safely as the
astronomer neglects the other. Now, this may be quite true if our
interest in human events is that of social astronomers who are watching
them from another planet. But because the inequalities of the earth are
nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to
the engineer and the geographer. The Alps for the astronomer may be an
infinitesimal and negligible excrescence; but they were not this to
Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to the astronomer
are all the dykes of Holland? But they are everything to the Dutch
between a dead nation and a living one. And the same thing holds good of
the inequalities of the human intellect. For the social astronomer they
are nothing. For the practical man they are everything.
It is in the astonishing confusion between speculative and practical
truth which characterised the evolutionary sociologists of the
nineteenth century that the socialists of to-day are seeking for a new
support to their system. And now let us consider the way in which they
themselves have improved the occasion, and apply the moral which they
have drawn from such a singularly deceptive source. The three points
which they aim at emphasising are the smallness of the products which
the able man can really claim as his own, the consequent diminution of
his claims to any exceptional reward on account of them, and the fact
that even the highest ability, however rare it may be, is very much
commoner than it seems to be, and will, for this reason in addition to
those just mentioned, be obtainable in the future at a very much reduced
price.
Of these three points the last is the most definite. Let us take it
first; and let us take it as stated, not by a professed socialist, but
by an independent and highly educated thinker such as Mr. Kidd. Mr.
Kidd's argument is, as we have seen already, that the comparative
commonness of ability of the highest kind is shown by the fact that, of
the greatest inventions and discoveries, a number have been notoriously
made at almost the same time by a number of thinkers who have all worked
in isolation. This argument would not be worth discussing if it were not
used so constantly by a variety of serious writers. The fact on which it
bases itself is no doubt true enough; but what is the utmost that it
proves? That more men than one should reach at the same time the same
discovery independently is precisely what we should be led to expect,
when we consider what the character of scientific discovery is. The
facts of nature which form its subject-matter are in themselves as
independent of the men who discover them as an Alpine peak is of the men
who attempt to climb it. They are, indeed, precisely analogous to such a
peak which all discoverers are attempting to scale at once; and the fact
that three men make at once the same discovery does no more to show that
it could have been made by the majority of their fellow-workers, and
that it was in reality made not by themselves but by their generation,
than the fact that three men of exceptional nerve and endurance meet at
last on some previously virgin summit proves the feat to have been
accomplished less by these men themselves than by the mass of tourists
who thronged the hotel below and whose climbing exploits were limited to
an ascent by the Rigi Railway.
Other writers, however, try to reach Mr. Kidd's conclusion by a
somewhat different route. Whether the great man is or is not a more
common phenomenon than he seems to be, they maintain that his conquests
in the realms of invention and discovery, when once made, really "become
common property," of which all men could take advantage if it were not
for artificial monopolies. All men, therefore, though not equal as
discoverers, are practically equalised by whatever the discoverers
accomplish. Now, of the simpler inventions and discoveries, such as that
of fire for example, this is perfectly true; but it is true of these
only. As inventions and discoveries grow more and more complex, they no
more become common property, as soon as certain men have made them, than
encyclopædic knowledge becomes the property of every one who buys or
happens to inherit an edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. It is
perfectly true that the discovery of each new portion of knowledge
enables men to acquire it who might never have acquired it otherwise;
but as the acquisition of the details of knowledge becomes facilitated,
the number of details to be acquired increases at the same time; and the
increased ease of acquiring each is accompanied by an increased
difficulty in assimilating even those which are connected most closely
with each other. We may safely say that a knowledge of the simple rules
of arithmetic is common to all the members of the English University of
Cambridge; but out of some thousands of students only a few become great
mathematicians. And the same thing holds good of scientific knowledge
in general, and especially of such knowledge as applied to the purposes
of practical industry. Knowledge and inventions, once made, are like a
river which flows by everybody; but the water of the river becomes the
property of individuals only in proportion to the quantity of it which
their brains can, as it were, dip up; and the knowledge dipped up by the
small brains is no more equal to that dipped up by the large than a
tumbler of water is made equal to a hogshead by the fact that both
vessels have been filled from the same stream.
Let us now pass on to the argument which, differing essentially from the
preceding in that it does not aim at proving that the great men are
commoner than they seem to be, or their knowledge more diffused, insists
that of what the great men seem to do very little is really their
own--or that, as Mr. Bellamy puts it, in words which we have already
quoted, "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of a thousand of their
produce is really the result of their social inheritance and
environment." Here, again, we have a statement, which from one point of
view is true. It is merely a specialised expression of the far more
general doctrine that the whole process of the universe, man included,
is one, and that all individual causes are only partial and proximate.
No man at any period could do the precise things that he does if the
country in which he lives had had a different past or present, any more
than he could do anything if it were not for his own previous life, for
the fact that he had been born, that his mind and body had matured, and
that he had acquired, as he went along, such and such knowledge and
experience. How could a man do anything unless he had some environment?
Unless he had some past, how could he exist at all? Mr. Bellamy and his
friends, when considering matters in this light, are not too extreme in
their conclusions. On the contrary, they are too modest. For men, if
they were really isolated from their social inheritance and environment,
could not only do but little; they could do absolutely nothing. The
admission, therefore, that for practical purposes they must be held to
do something at all events, is an admission wrung from our philosophers
by the exigencies of common-sense. As such, then, let us accept it; and
what will our conclusion be? It will be this: that whatever it may be
which the ordinary man produces, and in whatever sense he produces it,
the great man, in the same sense, produces a great deal more. The
difference between them in efficiency will be no more lessened by the
fact that both are standing on the pedestal of a common past, than the
difference in stature will be lessened between a dwarf and a giant
because they are both standing on the top of a New York skyscraper, or
because they have both been nourished on the same species of food.
But the practical absurdity of the whole set of arguments urged in a
contrary sense by Herbert Spencer, Mr. Kidd, and the speculative
sociologists generally, is brought to its climax by those modern
exponents of socialism who attempt to invest them with a moral as well
as an industrial significance. Thus Mr. Webb, who himself frankly
recognises that the monopolists of business ability are industrially
more efficient than the great mass of their fellows, and that man for
man they produce incomparably more wealth, endeavours, by means of the
arguments which we have been just considering, to show that though they
produce it they have no moral right to keep it. The proposal, he says,
that, though men are vastly unequal in productivity, they should all of
them be awarded an equal share of the product--that if one man produces
only one shilling, while another man produces ninety-nine, the resulting
hundred should be halved and each of the men take fifty--this proposal
"has," he says, "an abstract justification, as the special energy and
ability with which some persons are born is an unearned increment due to
the effect of the struggle for existence upon their ancestors, and
consequently, having been produced by society, is as much due to society
as the unearned increment of rent."
Now, if this argument has any practical meaning at all, it can only mean
that the men who have been born with such special powers will, as soon
as they recognise what the origin of these powers is, realise that they
have, as individuals, no special claims on the results of them, and will
consequently become more willing than they are at the present time to
continue to produce the results, though they will not be allowed to
keep them. We will not insist, as we might do, on the curious want of
knowledge of human nature which the argument thus put forward by Mr.
Webb and other socialists betrays. It will be enough to point out that,
if it applies to the monopolists of business ability, it applies with
equal force to all other sorts of men whatever. If it is to society as a
whole that the able man owes his energy, his talents, and the products
of them, it is to society as a whole that the idle man owes his
idleness, the stupid man his stupidity, and the dishonest man his
dishonesty; and if the able man, who produces an exceptional amount of
wealth, can with justice claim no more than the average man who produces
little, the man who is so idle that he shirks producing anything may
with equal justice claim as much wealth as either. His constitutional
fault, and his constitutional disinclination to mend it, are both of
them due to society, and society, not he, must suffer.
If we attempted to organise a community in accordance with such a
conclusion as this, we should be getting rid of all connection between
conduct and the natural results of it, and divorcing action from motive
altogether. Such is the conclusion to which Mr. Webb's argument would
lead us; and the absurdity of the argument, as applied by him to moral
claims and merits, though more self-evident, is not any more complete
than the absurdity of similar arguments as applied to the individual
generally in respect of his productive powers, and the amount of
produce produced by them. The whole conception, in short, of the
individual as merged in the aggregate has no relation to practical life
whatever. For the practical man the individual is always a unit; and it
is only as a unit that it is possible practically to deal with him. We
may change him in some respects by changing his general conditions, as
we hope to do by legislation which aims at the diminution of
drunkenness; but a change in general conditions, if it diminished
drunkenness generally, would do so only because it affected at the same
time the isolated minds and organisms of a number of individual
drunkards.
And to do Mr. Webb and his brother socialists justice, they
unconsciously admit all this themselves; for, as soon as they set
themselves to discuss the motives of the able man in detail, they
altogether abandon the irrelevancies of speculative sociology with which
they manage at other times to bemuse themselves. That such is the case
we shall see in the following chapter. I will, however, anticipate what
we shall see there by mentioning that among the motives which are in the
socialistic future to replace, among able men, the desire of economic
gain, one of the chief is to be the desire of moral approbation. Unless
a man's actions, whether industrial or moral, are to be treated as his
own, instead of being attributed to his conditions, he would have as
little right to the praise which it is proposed to give him as he would
have to the dollars which it is proposed to take away.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] I first made this criticism of Spencer in my work _Aristocracy and
Evolution_. On that occasion Mr. Spencer wrote to me, complaining with
much vehemence that I had misrepresented him; and he repeated the
substance of his letter in a subsequent published essay. My criticism
dealt, and could have dealt only, not with what he meant, but what he
said; and certainly in his language--and, as I think, in his own
mind--there was a constant confusion between the two truths in question.
Apart, however, from what he considered to be my own misrepresentation
of himself, he declared that he entirely agreed with me; and that "great
men" must, for practical purposes, be regarded as the true causes of
such changes as they initiate.