of positive evils such as overwork or starvation or irregularity of
employment. In their rejection of the existing order of Coketown, with
its rubbish heaps for the disposal of material waste, and its jails,
hospitals, sanatoria, doss houses, Salvation Army Headquarters, and
charitable organizations for the disposal of the human excrement of
industrialism--in turning their backs upon these things and asserting
the simple elements of human dignity, all our radical programs were
right and inevitable. To reject what industrial society had to offer
its members in the filthy factory districts and wretched slums of
Coketown was obviously to reject barbarism and degradation of the worst
sort: the incredible thing about the industrial revolution, indeed,
is not that there were a few riots here and there against the use of
machinery, but that the industrial population has not been in a state
of continual insurrection, and that the industrial towns have not been
looted and razed again and again. It is nothing less than a tribute
to the fundamental good nature and sweetness of human beings that the
strikes by which the workers have expressed their sense of grievance
have not demolished the material hovels that today stand upright in the
valleys of York-Riding, in the valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries,
or in that terrible slum which stretches in back of the Jersey meadows
from Elizabeth into Patterson. There are many districts in these areas
which are scarcely worth the respect of orderly demolition. To give a
grim rejection to the society that produced them only mildly meets the
situation. They should be destroyed by trumpets and God’s wrath--like
Jericho!
So much for what is sound and valid in the various one-sided programs
for reform. But if their attitude towards the past performances of
industrialism was sound, their gesture towards the future, and their
attitude towards the whole milieu, was little less than indifferent.
There were to be certain gains in money wages, in political control,
in the distribution of products, and so forth; but the realization
of these gains was never projected in any very vivid way--a vague
fellowship in peace and plenty under gay red banners was all that was
left over when the current efforts to “educate the masses,” “revise the
constitution,” or “organize the revolution” were taken for granted.
In his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels made a plea
for a realistic method of thought, which limited itself to a here and
now, as against what he derided as the utopian method, the attempt
on the part of a single thinker to give a detailed picture of the
society of the future. Yet at the present time it is easy to see that
if the utopian socialism of Owen has been ineffective, the realistic
socialism of Marx has been equally ineffective; for while Owen’s kind
of socialism has been partly fulfilled in the co-operative movement,
the dictatorship of the proletariat rests upon very shaky foundations,
and such success as it has had is due perhaps as much to Marx’s
literary picture of what it would be like as to anything else. I do not
doubt that the partisan movements have achieved many specific gains;
consumer’s co-operation alone has in England measurably lightened the
physical burden of existence for a great many people. Their weakness
consists in the fact that they have not altered the contents of
the modern social order, even when they have altered the method of
distribution; and in addition, a good many of these partisan utopias,
for lack of any definite and coherent scheme of values, crumble away
as soon as they meet the opposition of such powerful collective
utopias as Coketown or the Country House. In America, particularly,
the labor movement is paralyzed by this perpetual movement into the
bourgeoisie--concretely speaking, into Suburbia and the Country
House--and in Great Britain much the same sort of dereliction can be
observed within the narrower group from which the leaders of the trades
unions and the Labor Party are drawn.
Hence also the less interesting problem of the Tired Radical, which
Mr. Walter Weyl suggestively outlined. There is indeed a pertinent
criticism of the paper environment of Megalopolis, in the tenacious way
in which people continue to cling to abstract programs and to movements
which never approach perceptibly nearer their fulfillment. The marvel
is that the concrete utopia of the Country House has not exercised a
more potent influence than it actually does. When one compares the vast
amount of agitation during the last century--the Chartist Movement,
the Socialist Movement, the International Peace Movement--with the
actual results in the reconstruction of work, place, and people, or
with the actual effects any reconstruction has had upon our polity,
our culture, our art--it is surprising that these movements have had
any effective claim upon our allegiance. Men will indeed work for an
idea--the notion that they will not is a superstition--but sooner or
later the spirit must be made manifest in the flesh, and if it never
comes to birth, or at best is an abortion, the idea is bound to wither
away.
How long would the parliamentary clatter of socialism have mechanically
kept on--had it not been for the dislocation of war? How long could
its abstract programs have remained in the air, before coming down to
specifications? I obviously cannot answer these questions; but it seems
plain enough that our radical programs have had simply a sentimental
interest: they moved people without giving them a specific task, they
stirred them emotionally without giving them an outlet, and so, at
best, they are but partial utopias of escape, using the powers of
organization, collective meetings, and pronunciamentos to take the
place of the emotional stimuli which the avowed utopia of escape, like
News from Nowhere, supplies by introducing a beautiful girl. In this
aspect, the Socialist Party, with its revolutionary demands, did not
differ in its psychological performance from the Republican Party,
which specialized in the rhetorical device of the full dinner pail;
nor did it differ in any fundamental way from the defunct Progressive
Party, which for a time believed in a new heaven and earth to follow
the initiative, referendum, and recall with an intensity of moral
conviction beside which the social revolutionist was positively tame.
Who doubts the honesty and sincerity of most of the members of these
parties? Who doubts their devotion to revolution or “uplift”? It is
all beside the point. A machine which doesn’t work because it is badly
constructed is just as useless as one that doesn’t work because its
maker is a deliberate fraud; and all the sincerity and good will and
honesty doesn’t make any one a smile the happier. It is about time that
we faced the facts and realized that in all our sundry mechanisms of
reform “there is a screw loose somewhere.” This pregnant metaphor of
the industrial age is usually applied to neurotic disorder; and I am
using it in the present context with fell intentions. I mean that the
utopia of the partisan is, psychologically speaking, a fetish; that
is to say, it is an attempt to substitute the part for the whole, and
to pour into the part all the emotional content that belongs to the
whole. When a man gets hold of a lady’s handkerchief or garter, and
behaves towards that object with as much intensity and interest as he
would towards its flesh and blood owner, the handkerchief or garter is
said to be a fetish. I hazard the judgment that Socialism, Prohibition,
Proportional Representation, and the various other abstract “isms” are
the fetishes of the partisan: they are attempts to make some particular
instrument or function of the community stand for the whole. It is
doubtless much easier to filch a handkerchief than to win a girl.
By the same token, it is easier to concentrate on the use of liquor
or the ownership of machinery and land than upon the totality of a
community’s activities. It is easier indeed; but it is fatal; for the
result of this fetishism is perhaps that the girl remains unmated, and
the society fails to undergo any fundamental change. Moreover, the
reforming elements in society become incapacitated by their practice
of fetishism to take a normal part in the community’s activities; and
remain so much waste material--at best, they wander between two worlds,
“one dead, the other powerless to be born.”
We know these disoriented reformers, these disillusioned
revolutionaries, these tired radicals; we could mention names if it
were not so needless and so cruel. Apart from anything else, their
original mistake was to keep their problem within the compartment of
politics and economics, instead of venting it to the wide world. They
forgot that the adjustment of some single activity or institution,
without respect to the rest, begged the very difficulty they were
trying to overcome. If they were anti-militarists, they saw the world
simply as an armed camp; if they were socialists, they saw it as a
gigantic mechanism of exploitation; and alas! they saw only so much of
the world as would conveniently fit within these diagrams. The world
is perhaps an armed camp and a mechanism of exploitation; it is all
that and much more; but any attempt to deal with it on a wholesale plan
by eliminating all the qualifying elements in the problem is bound to
encounter the brute nature of things; and if the nature of things is
essentially antagonistic, the reform itself will fail.
To say all this is to emphasize the obvious. If any further emphasis
were needed it would be necessary only to compare the doctrines of
Marx, as expounded by Lenin at the beginning of the Russian Revolution,
and the doctrines of Lenin, as tempered by experience and circumstance
a few years later.
3
There was still another weakness that characterized all the partisan
utopias of the nineteenth century. That weakness was their externalism.
If the mediæval thinkers were convinced that, on the whole, nothing
could be done to rectify men’s institutions, while men themselves were
so easily bitten by corruption, their successors in the nineteenth
century committed the opposite kind of error and absurdity: they
believed that human nature was unsocial and obstreperous only because
the church, the state, or the institution of property perverted every
human impulse. Men like Rousseau, Bentham, Godwin, Fourier, and Owen
might be miles apart from one another in their criticism of society,
but there was an underlying consensus in their belief in human nature.
They looked upon human institutions as altogether external to men;
these were so many straitjackets that cunning rulers had thrown over
the community to make sane and kindly people behave like madmen; and
they could conceive of changing the institutions without changing the
habits and redirecting the impulses of the people by whom and for whom
they had been created. If one devised neat political constitutions,
with plenty of checks and balances, or laid out pauper colonies and
invited the countryside to make use of them--well, all would be to the
good.
There was, it is true, one great exception to this notion that
institutions might be reformed without, in that process, making over
men. I refer to the belief in education which accompanied these
classic criticisms of human institutions; for this seems to point to
a perception that men needed a special training and discipline before
they could enter freely into the life of a reconstituted community. But
upon examination, this exception melts away. The emphasis in the new
programs of education was upon the formal, institutional acquirement
of the apparatus of knowledge; and they, too, began with the clean
slate of a new generation, whereas the critical difficulty was that
of getting the adult community sufficiently educated, in a realistic
sense, to be able to make over its educational institutions; and in
this respect the reformers were just as much in Cuckooland as--well,
Campanella. So it follows that the Country House and Coketown shared
honors in building up the new educational organizations; and the
outcome of the sort of education that the public school and college
provided was to make these redoubtable utopias practically unassailable.
Besides, there were the adults: consider Robert Owen!
Robert Owen, one of the most sanguine advocates of popular education,
was himself a living example of the need for a different kind of
discipline than his narrow and homiletic mind, with its childish
interpretation of religious belief and its equally childish
rationalism, was capable of framing. No one ever frustrated so many
good ideas, from the plan of garden cities down to the project for
co-operative production than this same Owen, whose bumptiousness,
arrogance, and conceit were bound to provoke reactions in other people
which would have defeated the plans of Omnipotence itself. The capital
difficulty was to get any sort of social improvement in a world that
was full of refractory Owens. A locomotive may, in a sense, be a more
perfect thing than the man who made it; but no social order can be
better than the human beings who take part in it; for whereas the
locomotive can stand apart from its operatives and perform all its
functions effectively even if the workers themselves are deficient in
every other respect than mechanics, with a social order the product and
the producer continue to be one.
Not merely does a community need a Buddha, let us say, before it
can produce Buddhism; it needs a whole succession of Buddhas if the
religion itself is not to fritter away into the hideous ecclesiastical
grind it became in Thibet. This principle has a general application.
The social critics of the last century confused the mechanical problem
of transforming an institution or of creating a new organization
with the personal and social problem of spurring people to effect
the transformation and see it through. Their tactics were those of
a general who would go into battle without training his army; their
strategy was that of the demagogue who talks of a million armed men
springing up overnight. The personal problem, the problem of education,
was as easy as that!
If we are to account for the poverty of our achievements in renovating
the community, in contrast with the enormous amount of quite
justifiable economic and political agitation, research, and criticism,
it is perhaps not altogether fair to put the entire burden of failure
upon the partisan’s lop-sided utopia. The plans of our reformers have
indeed been weak and jerrybuilt in themselves; but that is not all.
What has perhaps been even more conspicuously lacking has been people
who are accessible to the existing knowledge, people whose minds have
been trained to play freely with the facts, people who have learned the
fine and exacting art of co-operating with their fellows; people who
are as critical of their own mental processes and habits of behavior as
they are of the institutions they wish to alter. As Viola Paget says:
“The bulk of thinking and feeling intended to help on human improvement
has not really been good enough for the purpose. Not good enough in the
sense of not sufficiently impersonal and disciplined.”
Between our programs, our utopias, and their fulfillment there has
usually dropt a thick veil of personalities; and were the plan itself
the collaborate product of the best minds of the race; as Mr. H. G.
Wells satirically pictured in Boon, it would still have to take its
chances with the wild asses of the devil that human weakness, apathy,
greed, lust for power, might release. Walt Whitman said of Carlyle
that behind the tally of his work and genius stood the stomach, and
gave a sort of casting vote. So one may say of every social movement,
that behind the tally of its theoretic background and its concrete
programs stand human beings--hale and sick, neurotic and stable,
well-intentioned and malicious--and give the casting vote.
Anyone who has read an important book, and then met the author, who has
respected an apparently significant social movement, and then met the
leaders behind the scenes, will realize how frequent is the difficulty
of reconciling theoretic agreement with the inaccessibilities and
prejudices and repugnances of particular personalities. No one can join
the work of even the most trivial sort of committee--be it a delegation
to shake hands with the Congressman or a body designated to revise the
rules of a tennis club--without discovering how the work in hand is
perpetually being balked and diverted by the play of personalities.
It is not a little significant that popular speech gives the word
“personalities” a derogatory meaning. Again and again the success or
failure in large collaborations hinges upon human factors that have no
bearing on the question at issue. Pope’s satiric words about wretches
hanging that jurymen may dine touches the point neatly. Our programs
for reconstruction that have not reckoned with the perpetual cussedness
of human nature and have no method for exorcising it are as shallow as
those older theologies which sought to make men live in grace without
altering the social order in which they functioned. Perhaps they could
learn something from the story of that ancient agitator who cured the
blind, the maimed, the sick, and the halt before he bade them enter
into the Kingdom of Heaven. Emerson well said in his essay on Man the
Reformer that it was stupid to expect any real or permanent change from
any social program which was unable to regenerate or convert--these are
religious phases for a common psychological phenomenon--the people who
are to engineer it and carry it through.
It would be so easy, this business of making over the world, if it
were only a matter of creating machinery. There has probably never
been lacking the sort of energy and talent that is needed for this
sort of work; and at any rate, during the last three centuries, with
the growth of technology, the mechanical services at the command of
our engineers and organizers are huge and adequate. Unfortunately, we
are still in the same ditch that Carlyle mordantly pointed out in his
essay on Characteristics: Given a world of knaves, we are trying by
various cunning devices to produce an honesty from their united action.
I do not share Carlyle’s contempt for human nature in the raw, but he
is quite right, I believe, in making fun of the superficiality of our
partisan utopias. These utopias were so concerned to alter the shell
of the community’s institutions that they neglected to pay attention
to the habits of the creature itself--or its habitat. That is why
mechanical devices play such an important part, perhaps, in all these
utopias, from Jeremy Bentham, with his Panopticon method of reforming
criminals, down to the hideous cog-and-wheel utopia of Edward Bellamy.
The conceptions of human life that our reforming groups have had have
been pretty thin and unsatisfying. Any adequate conception of a new
social order would, it seems to me, include the scenery, the actors,
and the play. It is a mark of our immaturity that we never seem able to
get beyond the scene shifting. Our social theorists, in so far as they
consider the actors at all, are inclined to treat them as mechanical
puppets. As for the play itself--the universal drama of courtship
and trial and adventure and contest and achievement, in which every
human being is potentially the hero or heroine--the play itself has
hardly entered into their consciousness. Their values have not been
human values: they have been such values as have been authenticated by
commerce and industry, values such as efficiency, fair wages, and what
not. These, at any rate, have been the immediate objects of effort,
and if human values hung vaguely in the background, they were to be
realized in a distant and unascertainable future. So one often feels
that no matter how base and deteriorated the modern community is, it
nevertheless retains in its totality a greater measure of human values
than many of the groups that have attacked its inadequacy have to offer.
All this comes out pretty plainly in the attitude of the labor groups
towards the current situation. Whether they are organized for political
action or for industrial warfare, their aims are curiously similar.
In the very act of contending against the present order, they have
accepted the ends for which that order stands and have been content to
demand simply that they be universalized. This perhaps accounts for the
essential uncreativeness of the labor movement. By a revolution they do
not mean a transvaluation of values: they mean a dilution and spreading
out of established practices and institutions. There may indeed be
plenty of excuse for this attitude in any particular situation--a
group of unorganized and semi-destitute workers such as those in many
American steel plants--but the worst of it is that this attitude
characterizes the more advanced and economically secure groups, and
creeps into such ultimate programs as one can deduce from attempts to
create workers’ educational institutions--as if a change in ownership
or the balance of power would alter the face of Coketown so that its
fires would no longer burn and its cinders no longer smut.
I have emphasized what is the weakness, as it seems to me, of the
labor movement; not because I am necessarily out of sympathy with any
particular measure that might be proposed, but because it illustrates
upon an enormous scale the point which I desire to make. The
prohibition movement, or the charity organization movement--towards
both of which I feel, on the contrary, a cordial antipathy--would
serve just as well for illustration; for they all have this common
distinction: they lack any explicit, consciously projected humane ends
which would make any particular measure that they might offer justified.
4
Let me now anticipate the answer which this criticism will probably
meet. To some people it will seem that the current movements for
reform are inevitably secular; that they have no business to concern
themselves with the ultimate faith of men; that they inevitably deal
with a limited here and now, a dollar more of wages, a drop less of
liquor, a touch more of uniformity, and so forth. In short, our partial
utopias need not concern themselves with any of the questions that have
to do with the life of the spirit.
The simple answer to this crude philosophy is--so much the worse for
them. The breach between the institutions that deal with the material
life and those that deal with the ideal life results either in a
complete dissociation, by which each set of institutions becomes
paralytic and imbecile; or, as so often happens, in a capitulation
of the spiritual power to the temporal, and its complete engrossment
in temporal ends. I am aware that these phrases, “spiritual” and
“temporal,” have a certain old-fashioned smell; but they precisely
express my meaning: it is plain that every community contains the
corresponding institutions--one group being devoted to values and
the other to means. When our reforms are not touched by a sense of
values, the result is that purely temporal ends are taken as ultimate,
and we have such notions as efficiency or organization regarded
as the very touchstone of social improvement. This is scarcely an
improvement over the old order of things, with which we are now so
dismally familiar--the state in which our values were not fertilized
by any intercourse with the concrete and actual world about us, and so
remained remote and sterile. In short, unless our reformers concern
themselves with the ultimate values of men, with what constitutes
a good life, they are bound to pander to such immediate faiths and
superstitions as the National State, Efficiency, or the White Man’s
Burden.
5
There is a final criticism of the partial utopias: our one-sided
reforms have had this fatal defect--they are one-sided. This
partisanship was expressed by their relation to the facts upon which
their programs were based, and in their attitude towards the people who
were to be affected by them.