SOCIALISM TRUE AND FALSE
In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth
of statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of
statecraft and all organizing spirits to attempt immediately
to scheme and arrange and achieve. Priests, schools of
thought, political schemers, leaders of men, have always
slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out
the whole--or, at any rate, completely think out definite
parts--of the purpose and future of man, clearly and
finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct
on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing
obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma,
persecution, training, pruning, secretive education, and all
the stupidities of self-sufficient energy.
The man who wrote that is not what is called a whole-hearted man as
regards any form of group-action. He does not "fit in." He is at bottom
a sceptic, and a sceptic is one who reduces every question to the
question of human nature. So that the socialism of Wells is necessarily
at variance with all the recognized group-forms of socialism,
Administrative, Philanthropic, and Revolutionary. I must briefly
indicate in each case what is the quality of this divergence.
As regards the first, he has a complete distrust of what Hilaire Belloc
has called the "Servile State;" and what he distrusts he virulently
dislikes. In his view, Administrative socialism, as it appears in Sidney
Webb and the Fabian Society, and in the tendency of contemporary
Liberalism, has led to an excessive conservatism toward the existing
machinery of government, it has depended altogether too much on
organization without popular support, and as a result has tended to
throw the whole force of the socialist movement into a bureaucratic
regime of small-minded experts. The activity of the Fabians especially,
he says, has set great numbers of socialists working in the old
governmental machinery without realizing that the machinery should have
been reconstructed first. The whole tendency of this method, as it is
exhibited in the works of the English Liberal Party of to-day, is toward
a socialization of the poor without a corresponding socialization of the
rich; toward a more and more marked chasm between the regimented workers
and the free employers.
And it throws the control of affairs into the hands of a mass of highly
specialized officials, technical minds, mutually-unenlightened experts.
In an age when the progress of society depends upon breaking down
professional barriers, when the genuine scientist, for instance, is a
man who passes beyond his own science and sees the inter-relationships
of all knowledge, the mind which has been trained in one habitual
routine is the most dangerous type of mind to place in authority. On the
one hand, society depends upon the coöperation of all sorts of
specialists, their free discussion, and comparison of methods, results,
and aims; on the other experts in office are apt to grow narrow,
impatient, and contemptuous, seeing nothing beyond their immediate
work,--and this particularly when they have been trained for
administration without any wide experience of the world.
Therefore upon experts as such, in distinction from constructive and
coöperating specialists, Wells, with all the force of his belief in the
ventilating of knowledge and the humanizing of affairs, wages an
unceasing war. _The First Men in the Moon_ satirizes, after the fashion
of Swift, a world where the expert view of life, not only in
administration but in all work, prevails. Each inhabitant of the Moon
has a single rigidly defined function, to which everything else in his
nature is accommodated. Thus certain types of machine-menders are
compressed in jars, while others are dwarfed to fit them for fine work,
"a really more humane proceeding", as Mr. Cavor observes, "than our
method of leaving children to grow into human beings and then making
machines of them." And in _The Great State_ he returns to his attack on
government by experts: "Whatever else may be worked out in the subtler
answers our later time prepares, nothing can be clearer than that the
necessary machinery of government must be elaborately organized to
prevent the development of a managing caste in permanent conspiracy,
tacit or expressed, against the normal man." And he adds: "The Great
State will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper
circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain
amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of
the stale official." One of the many and increasing indications, one
might suggest, of the remarkable tendency in Wells to find good in the
old humanistic Tory, as distinguished from the modern bureaucratic
Liberal, view of life.
But lest I be tempted to carry this latter suggestion too far just at
this point, I pass on to his equally virulent dislike of Philanthropic
socialism and the busy Superior Person in affairs; especially the type
of political woman so dear to Mrs. Humphry Ward's heart. If the expert
bureaucratic point of view represents the action of socialist thought on
the Liberal Progressive mind, so also the philanthropic superior point
of view represents the action of socialist thought on the Conservative
mind. It is arrogant, aggressive, and condescending. It implies the
raising of one's inferiors, and what weak mortal should assume that she
(for this happens to be a mainly feminine affliction) is the standard
according to which other mortals ought to be raised?
Two of these energetic ladies have been pictured with a bitter vividness
by Wells in Altiora Bailey and Aunt Plessington, the former summing up
the Fabian-expert view, the latter summing up the Superior-philanthropic
view. Altiora has "P.B.P."--_pro bono publico_--engraved inside her
wedding ring. All the misery of the world she marshals invincibly in
statistics. She sees everything as existing in types and classes; she
pushes her cause with a hard, scheming, and wholly self-centred
eagerness, managing political dinners, indefatigably compiling
blue-books, dreaming of a world nailed as tightly and firmly under the
rule of experts as a carpet is nailed with brass tacks.
On the other hand Aunt Plessington is the incarnation of a "Movement"
somewhat vague in purpose but always aggressively beneficial to the
helpless ones of the earth. "Her voice was the true governing-class
voice, a strangulated contralto, abundant and authoritative; it made
everything she said clear and important, so that if she said it was a
fine morning it was like leaded print in the _Times_." Her mission is
principally to interfere with the habits and tastes of the
working-class, making it impossible for them to buy tobacco and beer or
"the less hygienic and more palatable forms of bread (which do not
sufficiently stimulate the coatings of the stomach)." She is, in short,
one of those odious managing people who know nothing of and care nothing
for human nature, who concern themselves wholly with the effects without
penetrating to the causes of misery, who see mankind as irrevocably
divided into a governing and a governed class, and whose idea of
government is to make the governed as uncomfortably efficient as
possible and as lacking in free will. She is exactly one of those
arrogant sterile souls, in love with methods rather than men, who have
made the Servile State an imminent and horrid possibility and have
turned so many misinformed human beings (including Tolstoy) against
socialism altogether.
If Wells dislikes Administrative and Philanthropic socialism because
they are not sufficiently human, he has an equal aversion to what is
called orthodox, that is to say, Revolutionary socialism; and in this he
includes all socialism that is fundamentally economic. "I have long
since ceased to trouble about the economics of human society," says
Stratton in _The Passionate Friends_, in words we are justified in
taking as the opinion of Wells himself. "Ours are not economic but
psychological difficulties."
That statement is full of meaning. It expresses, not a fact but a
personal conviction--the personal conviction with which the
psychological constructive socialism of Wells begins. But before I pass
on to this I must make one comment that persists in my mind.
Nothing is more remarkable than the unanimity with which during the last
few years the advanced world has put all its eggs in the basket of
pragmatism, the basket that has been so alluringly garnished by
Bergson's _Creative Evolution_, In this movement of thought Wells has
inevitably become one of the leaders, and his practical desertion of the
socialist cause is one of the main symptoms of it. The creative energies
of men, where society as a whole is concerned, are, in this philosophy,
conceived as bursting through the husks and institutions of the world,
not consciously destroying them but shedding them incidentally and
passing on. Now as regards sociology there is an obvious fatalism in
that; for the burden of proof lies once more on a personal basis, on a
personal basis qualified by the capacity of the person. It is true that
this creative and constructive tendency, like the total tendency of
modern life, is in the direction of socialism, it is true that a
thousand elements in modern life which could never be engaged in the
class-war are led by it into line with socialism. Yet there capitalism
is! Only the black-browed Marxian steadily contemplates the fact that
year by year the rich compound their riches and the poor their poverty,
while those that have no chance of creative outlets plant dynamite.
I do not mean that Wells is "wrong" in abandoning the economic for the
psychological approach,--that is plainly the inevitable course for him.
I wish simply to mark a distinction. The gospel of Wells is an entirely
personal one; it frankly concerns itself with the inner realities of the
human mind, and in that lies its great importance. But let us
discriminate. Like every purely personal doctrine it contains, in
relation to the facts and causes of society, a certain quietism. It
withdraws the mind from corporate action and lays emphasis on corporate
thought. But it recognizes no corporate enemy. To be an opponent of
capitalism as such, is, in this philosophy, as quaint and crude and
crusty as to be an anti-suffragist or a believer in politics (for it has
become the fashion to believe with fervor in the franchise and scarcely
to believe at all in what the franchise stands for).
There is then a certain danger in the creative pragmatism of this
particular time. If it actually does penetrate to the head men of the
world, if it is able to generate what I suppose may be called a "moral
equivalent" of duty--and there is almost a probability that it will--the
hazard is won. If it does not--and many keen thinkers and men of action
are obdurate--then we shall simply have the _fait accompli_ with
compound interest. What if it should turn out in the end, after the best
brains of socialism had all withdrawn from the economic programme of
socialism, that capitalism grows all the greener in the sunlight of
their tacit consent? There is Congress, there is Parliament, and there
they propose to remain. Suppose they are not converted from the top? Is
it altogether wise to stop persecuting them from the bottom?
So much before I pass on. This comment does not qualify the teaching of
Wells. It merely supplements it from the economic side, and the
supplement seems to me an important one.
Of a piece with his whole point of view is that he calls the right
sociological method not a scientific but an artistic method: it consists
of the making and comparing of Utopias. This idea he sets forth in his
paper _The So-called Science of Sociology_. "What is called the
scientific method," he says, "the method of observation, of theory about
these observations, experiments in verification of that theory and
confirmation or modification, really 'comes off' in the sciences in
which the individuality of the units can be pretty completely ignored."
The method that is all-important in the primary physical sciences where
the individuality of atoms and molecules may conveniently be ignored for
the sake of practical truth, becomes in his view proportionately untrue
as the sciences in their gradation approach the human world. "We
cannot," he says in _First and Last Things_, "put humanity into a museum
and dry it for examination; our one still living specimen is all
history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no
satisfactory means of dividing it and nothing in the real world with
which to compare it. We have only the remotest idea of its 'life-cycle'
and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its destiny." And in the
paper I have just mentioned he speaks of the Social Idea as a thing
"struggling to exist and realize itself in a world of egotisms, animals,
and brute matter.... Now I submit it is not only a legitimate form of
approach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful form of
approach, to endeavor to disentangle and express one's personal version
of that idea, and to measure realities from the standpoint of that
realization. I think, in fact, that the creation of Utopias--and their
exhaustive criticism--is the proper and distinctive method of
sociology." This notion of sociology as properly artistic in method and
diagnostic in aim indicates his main divergence from the methods and
aims of Comte and Spencer.
And so one turns to his own illustration of this belief, _A Modern
Utopia_. It is a beautiful Utopia, beautifully seen and beautifully
thought; and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint one
finds in _News from Nowhere_. Morris, of course, carries us into a world
where right discipline has long since produced right will, so wholly and
instinctively socialized that men can afford to be as free as anarchists
would have the unsocialized men of our own time, a world such as Goethe
had in mind when he said: "There is in man a force, a spring of goodness
which counterbalances egoism; and if by a miracle it could for a moment
suddenly be active in all men, the earth would at once be free from
evil." Well, that is the miracle which has in some way just taken place
before the curtain goes up on most Utopias; and I think that Wells has
never been more skilful than in keeping this miracle quietly in his bag
of tricks and devising meanwhile a plausible transition between us and
that better world. It all happens in a moment and we are there. By an
amazing legerdemain of logic he leaps the gap and presents us with a
planet which at every point tallies with our own. It is a planet which
does not contain a State but is a State, the flexible result of a free
social gesture.
_Mankind in the Making_ should be taken as introductory to _A Modern
Utopia_. It is the sketch of a method towards attaining such a world
state. It is a kind of treatise on education based on the assumption
that "our success or failure with the unending stream of babies is the
measure of our civilization." It opens with a complete repudiation of
"scientific" breeding, as a scheme which ignores the uniqueness of
individual cases and the heterogeneous nature of human ideals. "We are,"
says Wells, "not a bit clear what points to breed for, and what points
to breed out;" while the interplay of strong and varied personalities we
desire is contradictory to any uniform notions of beauty, capacity, and
sanity, which thus cannot be bred for, so to speak, in the abstract. But
in _A Modern Utopia_ he outlines certain conditions limiting parentage,
holding it necessary that in order to be a parent a man must be above a
certain minimum of capacity and income, failing which he is indebted to
the State for the keep of his children. Motherhood is endowed and
becomes in this way a normal and remunerative career, which renders the
mother capable of giving her time to the care and education of her
children, as millions are not in a wage-earning civilization, and makes
both her and her children independent of the ups and downs of her
husband. His very detailed suggestions about the education of young
children (illustrated also in _The Food of the Gods_) are at once a
reminiscence of Rabelais and an anticipation of Madame Montessori. He
insists upon uniform pronunciation (a very important matter in England,
where diversity of language is one of the bulwarks of a rigid
class-system), the universality and constant revision of text-books, the
systematic reorganization of public library and bookselling methods,
with a view to making the race think as a whole. He urges the necessity
of rescuing literature from the accidents of the book-market by endowing
critical reviews, chairs for the discussion of contemporary thought, and
qualified thinkers and writers regardless of their special bias or
principles. To strike a mean between the British abuse of government by
hereditary privilege and the American abuse of government by electoral
machines he ingeniously proposes the election of officials by the jury
method, twenty or thirty men being set aside by lot to determine the
proper holders of office. And he is convinced of the importance in a
democracy of abundant honors, privileges, even titles, and abundant
opportunities for fruitful leisure.
I have already spoken of his belief that the right sociological method
is the creation and comparison of individual Utopias. Thus his own
free-hand sketch of a better world is, in fact, a criticism of all
previous works of the kind. As distinguished from them the modern
Utopia, he says, has to present not a finally perfect stage but a
hopefully ascending one; it has to present men not as uniform types but
as conflicting individualities with a common bond; and moreover it has
to occupy, not some remote island or province "over the range" but a
whole planet. The Utopia of Wells is a world which differs from the
present world in one fundamental respect only--it has one initial
advantage: that every individual in it has been _started right_, in the
degree in which the collective knowledge of the world has rendered that
possible.
But there is no need for me to say anything more about these books. They
are the free and suggestive motions of a mind inexhaustibly fertile and
given to many devices. Anyone who has read Wells at all is aware of his
ingenuity, his equal capacity for large schemes and minute details, his
truly Japanese belief in radical changes, once they are seen to be
necessary and possible. And indeed the details of social arrangement
follow naturally and profusely enough, once you get the frame of mind
that wishes them. Wells in his Utopia presupposes the frame of mind. In
short, he puts education first; he believes that the essential problems
of the present are not economic but psychological.
And here where the constructive theory of Wells begins, let me quote a
passage from _The New Machiavelli_ that gives the gist of it:
The line of human improvements and the expansion of human
life lies in the direction of education and finer
initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far
beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot
collectively invent devices and solve problems on a much
richer, broader scale than it does at the present time, it
cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more
general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe,
therefore, that it can develop such a training and
education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And
here my initial difficulty as against crude democracy comes
in. If humanity at large is capable of that high education
and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must
its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if
those who have power and scope and freedom to respond to
imaginative appeals cannot be won to the idea of collective
self-development, then the whole of humanity cannot be won
to that. From that one passes to what has become my general
conception in politics, the conception of the constructive
imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful
people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst whom
power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious,
highly selective, open-minded, devoted, aristocratic
culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in
the development of human affairs. I see human progress, not
as the spontaneous product of crowds of low minds swayed by
elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of
intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and
curiosity liberated and acting at leisure, of human passions
and motives, modified and redirected by literature and art.
This permeation of the head men of the world, this creation of a natural
collective-minded aristocracy appears now to be the permanent hope of
Wells. It is the stuff of all his novels, it is the centre of his
ethical system; and his _Utopia_ is made possible by the existence in it
of just such a flexible leading caste--the so-called Samurai. But
before coming to the inner implications of this, to the individual and
personal realities and difficulties of this, I must follow the
development of the idea in Wells himself. At various times, in various
works, he has presented it from a dozen different angles: as something
that is certain to come, as something he greatly desires to come, as
something that will not come at all except through prodigious effort, as
something that will come through a general catastrophe, as something
that will come through isolated individual endeavor, and the like. That
is to say he has presented his idea through all the various literary
mediums of exposition, fable, prophecy, psychological analysis, and
ethical appeal.
It appears in a crude form in his first avowedly sociological work,
_Anticipations_. He there attempts to show that the chaos of society is
of itself beginning to generate a constructive class, into whose hands
it must ultimately fall. The advance of mechanism, he predicts, will
produce four clearly defined classes: an immense shareholding class with
all the potentialities of great property and a complete lack of function
with regard to that property; a non-producing class of middle-men
dependent on these, and composed of agents, managers, lawyers, clerks,
brokers, speculators, typists, and organizers; the expropriated class of
propertyless and functionless poor, whose present livelihood is
dependent on the fact that machinery is not yet so cheap as their labor.
And amid this generally disorganized mass a fourth element will define
itself. This in rudiment is the element of mechanics and engineers,
whose work makes it necessary for them to understand the machines they
are making and to be continually on the lookout for new methods. These
men, he holds, will inevitably develop a common character based on a
self-wrought scientific education and view of life. About them as a
nucleus all the other skilled and constructive minds--doctors, teachers,
investigators, writers, and the like--will tend to group themselves; and
as the other classes in their very nature will tend to social
disintegration, these will inevitably grow more and more conscious of a
purpose, a reason, a function in common, and will disentangle themselves
from the aimless and functionless masses about them. Democracy, as we
know it, will meanwhile pass away. For democratic government unavoidably
reduces itself to government by party machines and party machines depend
for their existence on alarms, quarrelsome patriotisms, and
international exasperations whose almost inevitable outcome is war.
Whether war follows or not, the power of society is bound to fall into
the hands of the scientifically trained, constructive middle class,
because this class is the only indispensable element in it. Without war
this must occur just as soon as the spending and purchasing power of the
shareholding class becomes dependent for its existence on the class
which alone can save society from destruction. With war it will occur
with even greater rapidity: for in the warfare of the future that nation
is bound to win which has most effectively realized socialist ideals, in
which the government can command, with least interference from private
control, its roads, its food, its clothing, its material, its resources,
which has most efficiently organized itself as a whole; and the class
that modern warfare will bring to the front is the class that knows how
to handle machinery and how to direct it. But just as this class will be
the most efficient in war, so will it be the most careful to prevent
war: it will in fact confirm the ultimate tendency toward a World State
at peace with itself, through the agency, not of any of the governments
that we know to-day but of an informal coöperative organization which is
altogether outside the governmental systems of society, and which may in
time assimilate the greater part of the population of the world.
Such is the argument of this book, and except for the inevitability of
it--the belief that all this _must_ come to pass--Wells has not since
abandoned it in any essential way. The new aristocracy that figures
there, the advance-guard of a better civilization, is precisely the
ethical ideal which is embodied in the chief characters of his novels.
Thus too the Samurai of _A Modern Utopia_ are figured as having arisen
at first informally as the constructive minds disentangling themselves
from the social chaos. Gradually becoming aware through research,
discussion and coöperation of a common purpose, they have at last
assumed a militant form and supplanted the political organizations of
the world.
The general intention of all this finds utterance in the most poetic of
all the fables of Wells, _The Food of the Gods_. The Food itself,
invented by two undistinguished-looking scientists, becomes current in
the world through the very haphazardness of a society which will not
control discoveries detrimental to it and which consequently has no
means of coping with a discovery capable of superseding it.
"Heracleophorbia" has thus the same initial advantage as Tono-Bungay or
any other shabby patent medicine. It has an additional advantage; for
while patent medicines have the sanction of private enterprise and are
controlled by secret patents for the gain of their inventors, the Food
of the Gods, like every discovery of honorable scientists, is given
freely to the world. Thus the Food and the gigantic race of supermen who
spring from it and bring with them a nobler order of things are
themselves generated by the very chaos they promise to supplant. Just in
proportion as the inventors are frank and open men, having no secret
gainful purpose, the Food spreads far and wide. It is stolen, spilled,
scattered; and wherever it falls every living thing grows gigantic.
Immense wasps drone like motor-cars over the meadows, chickens grow as
large as emus, and here and there a baby fed upon it and unable
thereafter to accept any less robust diet grows gradually to Rabelaisian
proportions. Caddles, a type of all the growing giants, comes to his
forty-foot maturity in a remote village where, as the mellow vicar
observes, "Things change, but Humanity--_aere perennius_." There he is
taught by the little folk to submit himself to all his governors,
teachers, spiritual pastors and masters and to order himself lowly and
reverently to all his betters. They put him to work in the chalk-pits,
where he learns to manage a whole quarry single-handed and makes of
himself a rudimentary engineer, and then he breaks loose and tramps to
London. He finds himself in the crowded New Kent Road, and they tell him
he is obstructing the traffic: "But where is it going?" he says; "where
does it come from? What does it mean?" Around him play the electric
signs advertising Yanker's Yellow Pills and Tupper's Tonic Wine for
Vigor, conveying to his troubled mind the significance of a world of
chaos and accident, perverted instinct, and slavery to base suggestion.
Is it necessary to say that society becomes alarmed at last? Is it
necessary to add that Wells opens fire upon it with his whole battery of
satire? Plainly men and giants cannot live in the same world; the little
men find their little ways, their sacred customs of order, home, and
religion threatened by a strange new thing. The Children of the Food
meanwhile have grown beyond the conventions and proportions of common
life; they have experienced a kind of humanity to which all men can
attain and from which there can be no retrogression to the lesser
scheme. In the end, having found one another, they assemble in their
embankment, the world against them. They sit amid their vast machinery,
Titanic shapes in the darkness broken by searchlights and the flames of
their forges. An ambassador from the old order brings them the terms
upon which they may go free. They must separate themselves from the
world and give up the Food. They refuse:
"Suppose we give up this thing that stirs within us," says the Giant
Leaguer.... "What then? Will this little world of theirs be as it was
before? They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of
men, but can they conquer?... For greatness is abroad, and not only in
us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the
nature of all things, it is part of time and space. To grow and still to
grow, from first to last, that is Being, that is the law of life."