THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY, CONTINUED.
ABILITY AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE
The fact that the speculative arguments which we have just now been
discussing are not only irrelevant to the problem of the able man and
his motives, but are tacitly abandoned as being so by the very men who
have urged them, when they come to deal specifically with that problem
themselves, may suggest to some readers that so long a discussion of
them was superfluous. But though the socialists abandon them at the very
moment when, if ever, they ought to be susceptible of some definite
application, they abandon them quite unconsciously, and still continue
to attach to them some solemn importance. Such being the case, then, the
more futile these arguments are the stronger is the light thrown by them
on the peculiar intellectual weakness which distinguishes even the most
capable of those who think it worth their while to employ them. For this
reason, therefore, if for no other, our examination of them will have
proved useful, for it will have prepared us to encounter a weakness of
precisely the same kind in the reasonings of the socialists when they
deal with motive directly.
Let us once more state this direct problem of motive, as with perfect
accuracy, stated by the socialists themselves. Under existing conditions
the monopolists of business ability are mainly induced to add to the
national store of wealth by the prospect, whose fulfilment existing
conditions make possible, of retaining shares of it as their own which
are proportionate to the amounts produced by them. The question is,
therefore, whether, if this prospect is taken away from them, socialism
could provide another which men of this special type would find equally
stimulating. Is human nature in general, and the nature of the
monopolists in particular, sufficiently adaptable to admit of such a
change as this? The socialists answer that it is, and in making such an
assertion they declare that they have all the facts of scientific
sociology at the back of them. The unscientific thing is, they say, to
assume the contrary; and here, they proceed, we have the fundamental
error which renders most of the conclusions of the ordinary economists
valueless. Economic science, in its generally accepted form, bases all
its reasonings on the behaviour of the so-called "economic man"--that is
to say, a being from whom those who reason about him exclude all
operative desires except that of economic gain. But such a being, say
the socialists, is a mere abstraction. He has no counterpart among
living, loving, idealising, aspiring men. Real men are susceptible of
the desire of gain, no doubt; but this provides them only with one
motive out of many; and there are others which, as experience amply
shows us, are, when they are given unimpeded play, far stronger. I do
not know whether socialists have ever used the following parallel; but
if they have not it expresses their position better than they have
expressed it themselves. They argue virtually that, in respect of the
desire for exceptional gain, able men are comparable to victims of the
desire for alcohol. If alcohol is obtainable, such men will insist on
obtaining it. They will constantly fix their thoughts on it; no other
fluid will satisfy them. But if it is placed altogether beyond their
reach, they will be compelled by the force of circumstances to drink
lemonade, tea, or even plain water instead. In time they will come to
drink them with the same avidity; and their health and their powers of
enjoyment will be indefinitely improved in consequence. In the same way,
it is argued, the monopolists of business ability, though, so long as it
is possible for them to appropriate a considerable share of their
products, they will insist on getting this share, and will not exert
themselves otherwise, need only be placed under conditions which will
render such gain impossible, and at once they will find out that there
exist other inducements which will prove before long to be no less
efficacious.
Such is the general argument of the modern school of socialists; but
they do not leave it in this indeterminate form. They have, to their own
satisfaction, worked it out in detail, and claim that they are able to
demonstrate from the actual facts of human nature precisely what the
character of the new inducements will be.
It may be looked upon as evidence of the methodical and quasi-scientific
accuracy with which modern socialists have set themselves to discuss
this question of motive that the thought of all of them has moved along
the same lines, and that what all of them fix upon as a substitute for
the desire of exceptional pecuniary gain is one or other, or all, of a
few motives actually in operation, and notoriously effective in certain
spheres of activity.
These motives practically resolve themselves into four, which have been
classified as follows by Mr. Webb or one of his coadjutors:
"The mere pleasure of excelling," or the joy of the most powerful in
exercising their powers to the utmost.
"The joy in creative work," such as that which the artist feels in
producing a great work of art.
The satisfaction which ministering to others "brings to the instincts of
benevolence," such as that which is felt by those who give themselves to
the sick and helpless.
And, lastly, the desire for approval, or the homage which is called
"honour," the efficiency of which is shown by the conduct of the
soldier--often a man of very ordinary education and character--who will
risk death in order that he may be decorated with some intrinsically
worthless medal, which merely proclaims his valour or his unselfish
devotion to his country.
Now, that the motives here in question are motives of extraordinary
power, all history shows us. The most impressive things accomplished by
human nature have been due to them. But let us consider what these
things are. The first motive--namely, that supplied by the mere
"pleasure in excelling"--we need hardly consider by itself, for, in so
far as socialists can look upon its objects as legitimate, it is
included in the struggle for approbation or honour. We will merely
remark that the emphasis which the socialists lay on it is not very
consonant with the principles of those persons who propose to abolish
competition as the root of all social evils; and we will content
ourselves with examining in detail the three other motives only, and the
scope of their efficiency, as actual experience reveals it to us.
We shall find that the activities which these three motives stimulate
are confined, so far as experience is able to teach us anything, to the
following well-marked kinds, which have been already indicated: those of
the artist, of the speculative thinker, of the religious and
philanthropic enthusiast, and, lastly, those of the soldier. This list,
if understood in its full sense, is exhaustive.
Such being the case, then, the argument of the socialists is as follows:
Because a Fra Angelico will paint a Christ or a Virgin, because a Kant
will immolate all his years to philosophy, because a monk and a sister
of mercy will devote themselves to the victims of pestilence, because a
soldier in action will eagerly face death--all without hope of any
exceptional pecuniary reward--the monopolists of business ability, if
only such rewards are made impossible for them, will at once become
amenable to the motives of the soldier, the artist, the philosopher, the
inspired philanthropist, and the saint. This is the assertion of the
socialists when reduced to a precise form; and what we have to do is to
inquire whether this assertion is true. Does human nature, as history,
as psychology, and as physiology reveal it to us, give us any grounds,
in fact, for taking such an assertion seriously? Any one who has studied
human conduct historically, who has observed it in the life around him,
and examined scientifically the diversities of temperament and motive
that go with diversities of capacity, will dismiss such an assertion as
at once groundless and ludicrous.
Let us, to go into detail, take the case of the artist. What reason is
there to suppose that the impassioned emotion which stimulates the
adoring monk to lavish all his genius on an altar-piece will stimulate
another man to devise, and to organise the production of, some new kind
of liquid enamel for the decoration of cheap furniture?[13] Or let us
turn to an impulse closely allied to the artistic--namely, the desire
for speculative truth, as manifested in the lives of scientific and
philosophic thinkers. These men--such as Kant and Hegel, for
example--have been proverbially, and often ludicrously, indifferent to
the material details of their existence. Who can suppose that the
disinterested passion for truth, which had the effect of making these
men forget their dinners, will stimulate others to devote themselves to
the improvement of stoves and saucepans?
Yet again, let us consider the area of the industrial influence of the
motives originating in religious fervour or benevolence. The most
important illustration of this is to be found in the monastic orders.
The monastic orders constructed great buildings; they successfully
practised agriculture and other industrial arts: and those of them who
were faithful to their vows aimed at no personal luxuries. On the
contrary, their superfluous possessions were applied by them to the
relief of indigence. But this industrial asceticism was made possible
only by its association with another asceticism--the renunciation of
women, the private home, the family. Even so, in the days when Christian
piety was at its highest, those who were capable of responding to the
industrial motives of the cloister formed but a fraction of the general
population of Christendom, while even among them these motives
constantly ceased to operate; and, as St. Francis declared with regard
to his own disciples, the desire for personal gain continually insisted
on reasserting itself. What ground have we here for supposing that
motives, whose action hitherto has always been strictly limited to
passionate and seclusive idealists turning their backs on the world,
will ever become general among the monopolists of that business ability,
the object of whom is to fill the world with increasing comforts and
luxuries. One might as well argue that, because the monastic orders were
celibate, and formed at one time a very numerous body, all men will
probably soon turn celibate also, and yet at the same time continue to
reproduce their species.
But the scientific quality of the psychological reasoning of the
socialists is best illustrated by their treatment of another class of
facts--that on which they themselves unanimously lay the greatest
stress--namely, the heroisms of the soldier, and other men of a kindred
type. The soldier, they say, is not only willing but eager to perform
duties of the most painful and dangerous kind, without any thought of
receiving any higher pay than his fellows. If, then, human nature is
such, they continue, that we can get from it on these terms work such as
that of the soldier's, which is work in its most terrifying form, it
stands to reason that we can, on the same terms, get out of it work of a
much easier kind, such as that of exceptional business ability applied
to the safe and peaceful direction of labour. Nor is this argument urged
by socialists only. Other thinkers who, though resembling them somewhat
in sentiment, are wholly opposed to socialism as a formal creed, have
likewise pitched upon the soldier's conduct in war as a signal
illustration of the potentialities of human nature in peace. Thus Ruskin
says that his whole scheme of political economy is based on the moral
assimilation of industrial action to military. "Soldiers of the
ploughshare," he exclaims in one of his works, "as well as soldiers of
the sword! All my political economy is comprehended in that phrase." So,
too, Mr. Frederic Harrison, the English prophet of Positivism, following
out the same train of thought, has declared that the soldier's readiness
to die in battle for his country is a realised example of a readiness,
always latent in men, to spend themselves and be spent in the service of
humanity generally. Again in the same sense, another writer observes,
"The soldier's subsistence is certain. It does not depend on his
exertions. At once he becomes susceptible to appeals to his patriotism,
and he will value a bit of bronze, which is the reward of valour, far
more than a hundred times its weight in gold"--a passage to which one of
Mr. Sidney Webb's collaborators refers with special delight, exclaiming,
"Let those take notice of this last fact who fancy we must wait till men
are angels before socialism is practical."
Now, the arguments thus drawn from the facts of military activity throw
a special light on the methods and mental condition of those who so
solemnly urge them; for the error by which these arguments are vitiated
is of a peculiarly glaring kind. It consists of a failure to perceive
that military activity is, in many respects, a thing altogether apart,
and depends on psychological and physiological conditions which have no
analogies in the domain of ordinary economic effort.
That such must necessarily be the case can be very easily seen by
following out the train of reasoning suggested by Mr. Frederic Harrison.
Mr. Harrison correctly assumes that no man, in ordinary life, will run
the risk of being killed or mutilated except for the sake of some object
the achievement of which is profoundly desired by him. If a man, for
instance, puts his hand into the fire in order to pick out something
that has dropped among the burning coals, we naturally assume that this
something is of the utmost value and importance to him. We measure the
value which a man places on the object by the desperate character of the
means which he will take to gain it; and Mr. Harrison jumps to the
conclusion that what holds good in ordinary life will hold equally good
on the field of battle also. Hence he argues--for this is his special
point--that the willingness of the soldier to die fighting on behalf of
his country shows how individuals of no unusual kind value their
country's welfare more than their own lives, and how readily, such being
the case, devotion to a particular country may be enlarged into a
religious devotion to Humanity taken as a whole. Now, there are
occasions, no doubt, in which, a country being in desperate straits, the
soldier's valour is heightened by devotion to the cause he fights for;
but that ideal devotion like this affords no sufficient explanation of
the peculiar character of military activity generally; and that there
must be some deeper and more general cause at the back of it, is shown
by the fact that some of the most reckless soldiers known to us have
been mercenaries who would fight as willingly for one country as for
another. And this deeper and more general cause, when we look for it, is
sufficiently obvious. It consists of the fact that, owing to the
millions of years of struggle to which was due, in the first place, the
evolution of man as a species, and, in the second place, the races of
men in their existing stages of civilisation, the fighting instinct is,
in the strongest of these races, inherent after a fashion in which the
industrial instincts are not; and will always prompt numbers to do, for
the smallest wage or none, what they could hardly, in its absence, be
induced to do for the highest. This instinct, no doubt, is more
controlled than formerly, and is not so often roused; but it is still
there. It is ready to quicken at the mere sound of military music; and
the sight of regiments marching stirs the most apathetic crowd.
High-spirited boys will, for the mere pleasure of fighting, run the risk
of having their noses broken, while they will wince at getting up in the
cold for the sake of learning their lessons, and would certainly rebel
against being set to work as wage-earners at a task which involved so
much as a daily pricking of their fingers.
Here we have the reason, embodied in the very organism of the human
being, why military activity is something essentially distinct from
industrial, and why any inference drawn from the one to the other is
valueless. And to this primary fact it is necessary to add another. Not
only is the fighting instinct an exceptional phenomenon in man, but the
circumstances which call it into being are in these days exceptional
also. Socialists frequently, when referring to the soldier's conduct,
refer also to conduct of a closely allied kind, such as that of the
members of fire-brigades and the crews of life-boats, and repeat their
previous question of why, since men like these will, without demanding
any exceptional reward, make such exceptional efforts to save the lives
of others, the monopolists of business ability may not be reasonably
expected to forgo all exceptional claims on their own exceptional
products, and distribute among all the superfluous wealth produced by
them just as freely as the fireman climbs his ladder, or as life-belts
are distributed by the boatmen in their work of rescue. And if human
life were nothing but a chronic conflagration or shipwreck, in which all
alike were fighting for bare existence, all alike being menaced by some
terrible and instant death, this argument of the socialists might
doubtless have some truth in it. The men of exceptional ability, by a
variety of ingenious devices, might seek to save others no less
assiduously than themselves, without expecting anything like exceptional
wealth as a reward; for there would, in a case like this, be no question
of wealth for anybody. But as soon as the stress of such a situation was
relaxed, and the abilities of the ablest, liberated from the task of
contending with death, were left free to devote themselves to the
superfluous decoration of life, the artificial tension of the moral
motives would be relaxed. The swimmer who had plunged into the sea to
save a woman from drowning would not take a second plunge to rescue her
silk petticoat. The socialists, in short, when dealing with military and
other cognate heroisms, ignore both of the causes which alone make such
heroisms possible. They ignore the fact that the internal motive is
essentially isolated and exceptional. They ignore the further fact that
the circumstances which alone give this motive play are essentially
exceptional also, and could never be reproduced in social life at large,
except at the cost of making all human life intolerable.
I have called special attention to this particular socialistic argument,
partly because socialists, and other sentimental thinkers, like Ruskin,
attach such extreme importance to it; but mainly because it affords us
an exceptionally striking illustration of the manner in which they are
accustomed to reason about matters with regard to which they
ostentatiously profess themselves to be the pioneers of accurate
science. One of the principal grounds--to repeat what has been said
already--on which they attack what they call the Economics of
Capitalism, is that it deals exclusively with the actions of "the
economic man," or the man whose one motive is the appropriation of
wealth. Such a man, they say, is an abstraction. He does not exist in
reality; and if economics is to have any scientific value it must deal
with man as a whole, in all his living complexity. As applied to the
orthodox economists this criticism has an element of truth in it; but
when the socialists attempt to act on their own loudly boasted
principles, and deal with human nature as a whole instead of only one of
its elements, they do nothing but travesty the error which they set out
with denouncing. The one-motived economic man who cares only for
personal gain is, no doubt, an abstraction, like the lines and points of
Euclid. Still the motive ascribed to him is one which has a real
existence and produces real effects. It has been defined with accuracy;
and by studying its effects in isolation we reach many true conclusions.
But the other motives, with which socialists declare that we must
supplement this, are treated by them in a manner so crude, so childish,
so incomplete, so deficient in the mere rudiments of scientific
analysis, that they do not correspond to anything. Instead of forming
any true addition to the data of economic science, they are like images
belonging to the dream of a maudlin school-girl. They have only the
effect of obscuring, not completing, the facts to which the orthodox
economists too closely confined themselves, but which, though
incomplete, are so far as they go actual.
Now, however, without getting out of touch with the socialists, let us
return to firmer ground, and having seen the futility of their attempts
to indicate any motive calculated to operate on the monopolists of
business ability, other than that supplied under the existing system by
the prospect of possessing wealth proportionate to the amount produced
by them, let us consider this motive in itself, as history and
observation reveal it to us.
And here in the presence of facts which no one seeks to deny, we shall
find that the socialists themselves are among our most interesting
witnesses, affording in what they assert a solitary and signal exception
to that looseness of thought and observation which is otherwise their
distinguishing characteristic. The motive here in question as ascribed
to the exceptional wealth-producer, the director, the man of business
ability--the motive which in his case the socialists propose to
supersede, but which is at present in possession of the field--commonly
receives from them the vituperative name of "greed." What they mean by
greed is simply the desire of the great wealth-producer to retain for
himself a share of wealth, not necessarily equal, but proportionate, to
the amount produced by him. And what have the socialists got to tell us
about greed, when they turn from their plans for superseding it in the
socialistic future to consider its operations in the actual past and
present?
They tell us a great deal. For what is, and always has been, their stock
moral indictment against the typical men of ability, the pioneers of
commerce, the capitalistic directors of labour, the introducers of new
inventions, the amplifiers of the world's wealth? Their chief indictment
against such men has been this--that their exceptional ability, instead
of being roused into action solely by the pleasure of benefiting their
fellow-men, has been utterly dead and irresponsive to every stimulus but
one; and that this has been personal greed, and personal greed alone.
Its influence, they say, is as old as civilisation itself, and was as
operative in the days when the prows of the Tyrian traders first
ploughed their way beyond the pillars of Hercules, as it is to-day under
the smoke-clouds of Manchester, of Pittsburg, and Chicago. Karl Marx
for example, in a very interesting passage written in England about the
time of the abolition of the Corn-laws, declared that the radical
manufacturers, who professed to support that measure on the ground that
it would secure cheap food for the people, were not moved in reality,
and were not capable of being moved, by any desire but that of lowering
the rate of wages, and thus increasing the surplus which they raked into
their own pockets. In other words, the psychologists of socialism
declare that, so far as the facts of human nature in the present and the
past can teach us anything, the desire of exceptional wealth is just as
inseparable from the temperament which, by some physiological law,
accompanies the power of producing it, as "the joy in creation" is from
the temperament of the great painter, or the love of a woman is from the
lover's efforts to win her.
We thus see that those thinkers who, when they are dealing with an
imaginary future, base all their hopes on the possibility of a complete
elimination of a certain motive from a certain special class of persons,
are the very men who are most vehement in declaring that in this special
class of persons the motive in question is something so ingrained and
inveterate that in no age or country has it ever been so much as
modified.
Nor does the matter end here; for the amusing contradiction in which
socialistic thought thus lauds itself, is emphasised by the fact that
the socialists, when they turn from the few to the many, assume in the
many, as an instinct of eternal justice, that precise desire for gain
which, in the case of the few, they first denounce as a hideous and
incurable disease, and then propose to cure as though it were the
passing cough of a baby. For what is the bait with which, from its first
beginnings till to-day, socialism has sought to secure the support of
the general multitude? It is mainly, if not solely, the promise of
increased personal gain, without any increased effort on the part of the
happy recipients. With Marx and the earlier socialists, this promise
took the form of declaring that every man has a sacred right to whatever
he has himself produced, and that, all the wealth of the world being
produced by manual labour, the labourers must never be satisfied until
they have secured all of it. The more educated socialists of to-day,
having gradually come to perceive that labour itself produces but a
fraction of this wealth only, have had to alter the form of their
promise, but they still adhere to its substance; and the altered form of
the promise does but bring out more clearly the fact that they appeal to
the desire of personal gain as the primary economic motive of the great
majority of mankind. For, whereas the earlier socialists contented
themselves with promising the labourer the whole of what he produced,
and promising it on the ground that he had himself produced it, what the
labourer is promised by the intellectual socialists of to-day is not
only all that he has produced--which in most cases he gets
already[14]--but a great deal more besides, which is admittedly produced
by others.
We thus see that, according to these theorists, the kind of moral
conversion which is to make socialism practicable is to be rigidly
confined to one particular class; for, on the part of the majority, no
change at all is required in order to make the socialistic evangel
welcome. So far as they are concerned, the Old Adam is quite sufficient.
None of us need much converting in order to welcome the prospect of an
indefinite addition to our incomes, which will cost us nothing but the
trouble of stretching out our hands to take it. Socialists often
complain that, under the existing dispensation, there is one law for the
rich and another law for the poor. They propose themselves to introduce
a difference which goes still deeper, and to provide the few and the
many, not only with two laws, but with two different natures, and two
antithetic moralities. The morality of the many is to remain, as it
always has been, comfortably based on the familiar desire for dollars.
The morality of the few is to be based on some hitherto unknown contempt
for them; and the class which the socialists fix upon as the subjects of
this moral transformation, is precisely the class which they denounce as
being, and as always having been, in respect of its devotion to dollars,
the most notorious, and the most notoriously incorrigible.
That arguments such as these, culminating in an absurdity like this, and
starting with the assumption that it is possible to animate a
manufacturer's office with the spirit of soldiers facing an enemy's
guns, should actually emanate from sane men would be unbelievable, if
the arguments were not being repeated from day to day by men who, in
some respects, are far from being incompetent reasoners. Indeed, many of
them themselves would, it seems, be extremely doubtful with regard to
the plasticity imputed by them to human nature, if it were not for a
theory of society which is not peculiar to socialism. This is the theory
that, in any community or nation in which each citizen is completely
free to express his will by his vote, and realises the extent of the
power which thus resides in him, the will of the majority has
practically no limits to its efficiency, and will be able in the future
to bring about moral changes, which are at present, perhaps, beyond the
limits of possibility, but are only so because the means of effecting
them have never yet been fully utilised. This theory of democracy we
will consider in the following chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Mr. G. Wilshire, in criticising this argument as stated in one of
my American addresses, declares that there would be nothing in socialism
to prevent any great artist (such as a singer) from making an even
larger fortune than he or she does now. But though a Melba, under the
existing system, demands a large price for her services, under socialism
all would be changed. Though she _could_ get it, she would no longer
want it. She would then want no reward but the mere joy of using her
voice. And he infers that this change which would take place in the
bosoms of great singers would repeat itself under the breast-pocket of
every leader and organiser of commercial enterprise. It would be hard to
find a better illustration of the purely fanciful reasoning commented on
in the text.
[14] The question of how much labour, _as such_, produces in modern
societies is discussed in a later chapter.