an argument and is looking for such facts as will bolster up his case.
That mood is inimical to free and intelligent thought: its object
is rhetorical triumph. Now it happens that in all the matters which
intimately concern a community, a person’s attitude towards the facts
not merely seems more important than the facts themselves, but seems so
deucedly important that the facts are ignored. The attitude of a group
of Southern whites who will lynch a negro on the report that he has
raped a white woman before they investigate the truth of the assertion
is a bestial exaggeration of a very natural human tendency. Men are
built for action rather than thought; or rather, since thought, on the
psychologist’s interpretation, is inhibited action, the business of
inhibition naturally comes a little hard to us; and when we are in a
place where we have the rough choice of pushing through the obstacle,
under a strong impulse of resentment (instinct of pugnacity) or may
quietly withdraw from the obstacle, survey it, and frame a plan of
action to circumvent it, our fundamental impulse is to follow the first
mode.
It is easy to see, for example, how the hideous human suffering
which accompanied the growth of the capitalist organization--and
still exists!--caused the socialists to concentrate attention upon
the subjects of ownership and profits, and long blinded them to the
specific problems of organization, distribution, and control within
the industries that might be affected by the program of socialization.
This concentration upon the particular aspect of a problem, like
the concentration upon a particular aspect of the solution, has
the weakness of ignoring the total situation, and it too crudely
simplifies the difficulties. In their haste to arrive at solutions and
remedies--for the life of man is short and the needs of the moment are
pressing--the partisans neglect to make a complete tally of the facts;
and they are too ready to let “common knowledge” take the place of a
thorough investigation of the data.
This weakness arises out of an almost instinctive tendency towards
partisanship; and it is one of the reasons that partisanship continues.
If nothing else prevents groups from getting together, their failure
to agree about the facts, and their lack of a method for getting at
the facts and focussing them, is responsible. If an examination of
the facts did nothing else, it might show at least the impossibility
of drawing any conclusion from them, and it might warn the partisan
to step warily. Thus the testimony that was offered for and against
Prohibition came from fairly high authorities on both sides; and if
there had been anything like right reason in the strategically stronger
camp, it would have convinced those who were interested in the welfare
of the community that nothing could be wisely done while the very basis
for judgment--scientific knowledge as to the place of alcoholic stimuli
in the life of the human organism--had not been established.
It is of course conceivable that men will quarrel and split when they
are fully apprised of the facts: we may well remember the story of
the British ambassador who confessed to his French colleague that
the reason he did not get on very well with the Americans was that
both countries unfortunately spoke the same language; but it is
inconceivable that they should ever reach an intelligent agreement
before they are in common possession of the facts. By ignoring the
necessity for substantiating his claims and assertions the partisan
frequently not merely fails to see his whole problem in all its
implications, but also prevents any one else from seeing it. Even when
the partisan is not intentionally blind, he lacks the discipline which
is essential to an open-eyed judgment of the case. What that discipline
may be I shall attempt to discuss in the next chapter.
The second weakness of partisanship is that it breaks the community
into vertical divisions, and promotes fictitious antagonisms and
kinships which run against the horizontal affiliations and loyalties of
a man’s life. This tendency was nicely illustrated in a play by Mr. St.
John Ervine, called Mixed Marriage, which dealt with the love affair
of a young girl and a young man who were separated by the religions
that had been handed down by their parents. In Mr. Ervine’s wretched
little Ulster community, these religions served as an excuse to keep
people from being friendly and decent to their neighbors. Now it is
obvious that mating, and making friends with those who have common
interests and sentiments, and mixing freely within the whole community,
are highly important horizontal interests; they tend to unite people
in a common bond which is fundamental for the reason that these
interests and activities are essentially human. The antagonism between
two Christian sects, on the other hand, undermines the good life as a
whole, because it insists that there is no other good than a religious
good--a good embodied in a pope, or in the practice of scoffing at a
pope--while it is obvious to anyone who has possession of his senses
that kissing a pretty girl is good, and having a friendly pipe with
one’s neighbor is good, and that institutions which prevent one from
doing these things at appropriate times are perverted and antisocial.
It is true that people who emphasize religious interests take “high
ground,” as the saying is, and that those who value the friendly pipe
seem by implication to take low ground: but what the partisans fail to
see is that there is a good human case for low ground, and that, for
the great majority of people it may prove to be not merely the only
practicable ground, but in its own right a good and sufficient one.
Now for Catholic and Protestant in Mr. St. John Ervine’s play one
may substitute Democrat and Republican, White Guard and Red Guard,
Socialist and Financier, Prohibitionist and anti-Prohibitionist and
the results will be just as deplorably the same. There are any number
of interests in a well-wrought life which lie altogether beyond these
categories, and it is the chief misdemeanor of partisanism, as opposed
to utopianism, that it tends to slight these general interests, and
either bring them into the service of the “ism” or urge that they be
neglected in devotion to the “cause.” The first method has been used
by the apostles of nationalism. The National State, recognizing that
art and culture and science could not be altogether engrossed in the
strategy of political warfare, promptly put these goods in the pigeon
hole labelled national resources. The partisans of the State talked
about American science as opposed to German science, of Italian art
as opposed to French art; and thus emphasized the things which men in
America had with other Americans in order to mark off more clearly the
things they had apart from men of similar interests in other countries.
The same thing happened in the Russian communist state, with its
attempt to set aside the common cultural heritage of mankind at large
and define a purely proletarian culture. The results in every case are,
I believe, incurably mischievous; and those who would promote the good
life must cease this infantile practice of asserting vainly that “my
father knows more than your father,” “my mother is more beautiful than
your mother”--and so on.
For the most part the second method has been indefatigably used. In
the political state the partisans make a great show of the gulf which
separates the political party in power from that which is outside,
and every other interest in life is supposed to be secondary to this
abysmal cleavage. In relatively crude communities, like the United
States and Ireland, these differences seem to be taken by the great
mass of people at their face value; whereas in England, which at least
has the virtues of disillusion, it is the great tradition of Parliament
that all the animosities of the floor are ignored in the bar of the
House of Commons, while all the congenialities and convivialities that
bind men together are emphasized. Lest I be accused of prejudice where
none exists, let me add that in the most substantial reconstruction
movement that Ireland possesses--I refer to agricultural co-operation
as promoted by Sir Horace Plunkett and A. E.--the horizontal interests
which bind men together as farmers and members of a local community
are successfully emphasized to the exclusion of irrelevant vertical
differences, at least in matters touching the organization and conduct
of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society; and that, as far as
I can see, this single organization has done more to promote the
good life in Ireland than any other institution, with the possible
exception of the equally non-partisan literary association which grew
up in Dublin under the leadership of A. E., William Butler Yeats, Lady
Gregory, and the rest of that fine and glorious crew.
Obviously, it is not altogether for nothing that men have joined
together in vertical organizations which are as broad as a continent,
let us say, or the European world. There is a sense in which the
Christians of Jerusalem have more in common with the Christians of Rome
than they have with the Jews and Mohammedans of their local region. In
the same way, I find myself more deeply drawn to certain friends of
mine in Bombay and London than I am towards my next door neighbor,
with whom the only recognizable bond is our common animus against a
rapacious landlord. So long as the vertical affiliation with people of
the same views in politics or religion or philosophy is a spiritual
affiliation a great deal of good may come out of it. When, however,
the things that draw people together as members of a vertical group
are used as a means of inflicting similar opinions or practices upon
the local community, without respect to its regional qualities, the
results are little less than disastrous. The rain falls on the just and
the unjust; more than that, the food that we grow, the houses that we
build, the roads that we lay down, the thoughts that we think, belong
to us as members of the human species who have inherited the earth and
the fullness thereof; and it is absurd to let differences in our idola
prevent us from participating equally in this common heritage.
At long last, the things that unite human beings as human beings,
the social inheritance that enables them to realize their stature as
human beings, are more important than any particular element that the
partisan may lay hold of. Whether our partisanism consists in being
first and foremost an American or first and foremost a Theosophist,
it tends to limit the world with which we may have commerce and so
impoverishes the personality. The person who insists upon being a
hundred per cent. American has by that very emphasis become something
less than half a man. By fastening attention upon a segment of the
world, the partisan creates a segment of a personality. It is these
segments or sects that any movement which aims at a general good in the
community must contend against. So long as work for the common welfare
meets with irrelevant partisanisms, so long will we lack the means of
creating whole men and women; and so long will the main concerns of
civilization be side-tracked.
6
What a vision these partisan utopias present! They are like the
scattered bones that the prophet saw in the terrible valley, and one
doubts whether even the breath of the Lord could knit them together
again into real bodies....
One of these partisan utopias issues from a bundle of red-tape;
everything is filed and ticketed and labelled there; and anything in
life that cannot be treated in this fashion does not exist. Another
is a mechanical contraption; somehow it seems to litter little
mechanical contraptions; and its aim is, it would seem, to do away with
vegetation and reproduction, so that everything under the sun might be
performed with the sterile accuracy of the machine. A third utopia of
the partisan calls human beings, with all their color and thickness,
“individuals,” and makes the good life a matter of legal relationships
without any regard to their necessities in time and space; such a
utopia could almost be carried in one’s pocket, so much is it a matter
of verbal statement. We need not go down the line. Singly, it is plain
that not one of these utopias would create a happy community; while if
all of these partisanisms could be realized the result could scarcely
be anything else than discord--such a discord as now exists and every
day becomes more raucous.
It would seem that we are at an impasse. Even if I have absurdly
exaggerated the futility of the reformers and revolutionaries, their
lack of any fundamental program and their inability to conceive an
essential reorientation in modern society, come out pretty plainly. If
our analysis did not prove this, the atmosphere of disillusion which we
breathe today, and which permeates every branch of literature, would
tell as much. In so far as we have accepted the modern social order we
are in ruin; and the next war that now threatens will, if it actually
comes to pass, only carry the ruin a little further. In so far as
we have pinned our hopes to current movements for reconstruction or
revolution, our plans are sickly and debilitated. In fact, the only
genuine signs of life seem to be in regions like Ireland, Denmark,
India, and China, which have stood outside the movement of industrial
civilization and have retained the values of an order which elsewhere
has been undermined and almost destroyed. It is not a pretty situation
to face; and small wonder that we are so slow and so reluctant to face
it. Whichever way we look, bankruptcy seems to threaten us.
It is time we endeavored to cash in the paper roubles of the partisan.
If our civilization is to hold together we must place its intellectual
currency on a new basis; we must exchange our abstract idealisms, our
abstract programs, our paperized pursuit of happiness for some of the
golden coinage of life, even though we cannot have our gold without
mixing it with baser metals.
CHAPTER TWELVE
How the half-worlds go, and how eutopia may come; and what we
need before we can build Jerusalem in any green and pleasant
land.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1
The sort of thinking that has created our utopias has placed desire
above reality; and so their chief fulfillment has been in the realm of
fantasy. This is true of the classic utopias that we have surveyed,
and it is true--though not perhaps quite so apparent--of the partial
utopias that were formulated by the various reconstruction movements
during the last century.
While the classic utopias have so far been nearer to reality that
they have projected a whole community, living and working and mating
and spanning the gamut of man’s activity, their projections have
nevertheless been literally up in the air, since they did not usually
arise out of any real environment or attempt to meet the conditions
that this environment presented. This defect has been suggested by the
very name of Utopia, for as Professor Patrick Geddes points out, Sir
Thomas More was an inveterate punster, and Utopia is a mock-name for
either Outopia, which means no-place, or Eutopia--the good place.
It is time to bring our utopian idola and our everyday world into
contact; indeed, it is high time, for the idola that have so far served
us are now disintegrating so rapidly that our mental world will soon
be as empty of useful furniture as a deserted house, while wholesale
dilapidation and ruin threaten the institutions that once seemed
permanent. Unless we can weave a new pattern for our lives the outlook
for our civilization is almost as dismal as Herr Spengler finds it
in Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Our choice is not between eutopia
and the world as it is, but between eutopia and nothing--or rather,
nothingness. Other civilizations have proved inimical to the good
life and have failed and past away; and there is nothing but our own
will-to-eutopia to prevent us from following them.
If this dissipation of Western Civilization is to cease, the first
step in reconstruction is to make over our inner world, and to give
our knowledge and our projections a new foundation. The problem
of realizing the potential powers of the community--which is the
fundamental problem of eutopian reconstruction--is not simply a matter
of economics or eugenics or ethics as the various specialist thinkers
and their political followers have emphasized. Max Beer, in his History
of British Socialism, points out that Bacon looked for the happiness of
mankind chiefly in the application of science and industry. But by now
it is plain that if this alone were sufficient, we could all live in
heaven tomorrow. Beer points out that More, on the other hand, looked
to social reform and religious ethics to transform society; and it is
equally plain that if the souls of men could be transformed without
altering their material and institutional activities, Christianity,
Mohammedanism, and Buddhism might have created an earthly paradise
almost any time this last two thousand years. The truth is, as Beer
sees, that these two conceptions are still at war with each other:
idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments;
and yet “the happiness of man on earth” depends upon their combination.
If we are to build up genuine eutopias, instead of permitting ourselves
to pattern our behavior in terms of fake utopias like Coketown, the
Country House, the National State, and all the other partial and
inadequate myths to which we have given allegiance, we must examine
anew the idola which will assist us in reconstituting our environment.
So we are forced to consider the place of science and art in our social
life, and to discuss what must be done in order to make them bear more
concretely upon “the improvement of man’s estate.”
2
There was a time when the world of knowledge and the world of dreams
were not separated; when the artist and the scientist, for all
practical purposes, saw the “outside world” through the same kind of
spectacles.
What we call “science” today was in its primitive state part and
parcel of that common stock of knowledge and belief which makes up a
community’s literature, or, as Dr. Beattie Crozier would have said, its
“Bible.” The departure of science from this main body of literature
begins for the Western World, probably, with the death of Plato and
the institution of Aristotle’s collections in natural history; and
from that point onwards the separate sciences, increasingly isolate
themselves from the general body of knowledge, and utilize methods
which had been unknown to the earlier philosophers and sages; so that
by the time the twentieth century dawns the process of differentiation
has been completed, and philosophy, once the compendium of the
sciences, has disappeared except as a sort of impalpable, viscous
residue.
When Aristotle divided his writing into the exoteric and esoteric
groups, into the popular and the scientific, he definitely
recognized the existence of two separate branches of literature,
two different ways of taking account of the world, two disparate
methods of approaching its problems. The first branch was that of
the philosophers, the prophets, the poets, and the plain people. Its
background was the generality of human experience: its methods were
those of discussion and conference: its criteria were those of formal
dialectics: its interests were specifically those of the community,
and nothing human was foreign to it. With the petrification of
Greek thought that followed the collapse of the Alexandrian school,
the second branch was slow in coming into its own. As late as the
eighteenth century its adherents were called natural philosophers, to
distinguish them from the more humane variety; and it is only with the
nineteenth century that the subject became universally known as science
and its practitioners as scientists.
In the Phædrus Socrates had expressed the humanist outlook of
literature by saying: “Trees and fields, you know, cannot teach me
anything, but men in the city can.” The shortest way of describing the
attitude of science is to say that it resolutely turned its back on
men in the city and devoted itself to the trees and fields and stars
and the rest of brute nature. If it paid attention to men at all it
saw them--if we may abuse an old quotation--as trees walking. Socrates
had said: Know thyself. The scientist said: Know the world that lies
outside man’s dominion. As science progressed these attitudes became
more rigid, unfortunately, and a conflict grew up between literature
and science, between the humanities and natural philosophy, which
has given both art and science the peculiar twist we shall presently
examine.
Now the developments in modern science go back, through the Arabic
thinkers, to ancient Greece; but the great advances that have been
made date back scarcely three centuries. On the basis of the precise
knowledge of physical relations which became available in mathematics,
physics, mechanics, and chemistry the startling changes which have been
crudely labelled the “industrial revolution” were carried through. If
the essential relationship between the world of ideas and the world
of action were ever in doubt, the industrial revolution, especially
in its later phases, would be a final demonstration; for beneath the
ostensible skyscrapers, subways, factories, telephone lines, and sewers
of the modern industrial city lie the immaterial foundations of western
physical science, laid down stone by stone in the remote, theoretic
researches of Boyle, Faraday, Kelvin, Leibniz, and the rest of that
great galaxy. With the far reaching effect of the idola of physical
science it is hardly necessary to deal. Everyone realizes how dependent
the advance in technology has been upon theoretic science, even though
the scientist himself, as Kropotkin pointed out, is sometimes slow in
admitting the debt of science itself to practical invention. The actual
world of machinery is at present, it seems fair to say, a parasite upon
this body of knowledge, and it would speedily starve to death if the
host were annihilated.
Science has provided the factual data by means of which the
industrialist, the inventor, and the engineer have transformed
the physical world; and without doubt the physical world has been
transformed. Unfortunately, when science has furnished the data its
work is at an end: whether one uses the knowledge of chemicals to
cure a patient or to poison one’s grandmother is, from the standpoint
of science, an extraneous and uninteresting question. So it follows
that while science has given us the means of making over the world,
the ends to which the world has been made over have had, essentially,
nothing to do with science. Accordingly, as I have suggested, the idola
of the Country House and Coketown and the National State, which were
built up by literature and art, have given the effective direction to
these transformations. So far, science has not been used by people
who regarded man and his institutions scientifically. The application
of the scientific method to man and his institutions has hardly been
attempted.
Even when one qualifies this last generalization, its outline remains
pretty sharp. The development of what are called the social sciences
was dimly outlined in Bacon’s Novum Organon; but it was not till the
eighteenth century, with Quesnay and Montesquieu, that the movement
gained any real headway, and down to this day a large part of what is
called science in Economics, Politics, and Sociology is only disguised
literature--work in which the jargon of science is accepted as a
substitute for the scientific method of arriving at factual truth, and
in which the effort to mold conduct overwhelms the attempt to reach
correct conclusions. Indeed, among the economists and sociologists
there has been a persistent dribble of discussion as to whether or not
their subjects entitled them to the august designation of scientists.
It is not without reason that the social and human sciences have been
distrusted by the devotees of physical science, so that, for example,
the British Association has long had a single section devoted to
the social sciences in which Sociology, the mother of them all, is
permitted to enter as a subclassification of Anthropology! The nearer
the investigator gets to man, the more easily he is overwhelmed with
the complexity of his subject; and the more tempted he is to adopt the
swift and easy partisan methods of the novelist, the poet, the prophet.
The mere concealment of this act of seduction under the rough, grey
cover of scientific jargon means frequently that the social scientist
has added to the offense of not being a good scientist by not even
being a good literary man.