CONSTRUCTIVENESS
The subject of this chapter is one which has already been considered
incidentally in connection with play, but it is now to be considered on
its own account.
The instinctive desires of children, as we have seen, are vague;
education and opportunity can turn them into many different channels.
Neither the old belief in original sin, nor Rousseau’s belief in
natural virtue, is in accordance with the facts. The raw material of
instinct is ethically neutral, and can be shaped either to good or
evil by the influence of the environment. There is ground for a sober
optimism in the fact that, apart from pathological cases, most people’s
instincts are, at first, capable of being developed into good forms;
and the pathological cases would be very few, given proper mental and
physical hygiene in the early years. A proper education would make it
possible to live in accordance with instinct, but it would be a trained
and cultivated instinct, not the crude unformed impulse which is all
that nature provides. The great cultivator of instinct is skill: skill
which provides certain kinds of satisfaction, but not others. Give a
man the right kinds of skill, and he will be virtuous; give him the
wrong kinds, or none at all, and he will be wicked.
These general considerations apply with special force to the will to
power. We all like to effect _something_, but so far as the love of
power is concerned we do not care what we effect. Broadly speaking,
the more difficult the achievement the more it pleases us. Men like
fly-fishing, because it is difficult; they will not shoot a bird
sitting, because it is easy. I take these illustrations, because in
them a man has no ulterior motive beyond the pleasure of the activity.
But the same principle applies everywhere. I liked arithmetic until I
learnt Euclid, Euclid until I learnt analytical geometry, and so on. A
child, at first, delights in walking, then in running, then in jumping
and climbing. What we can do easily no longer gives us a sense of
power; it is the newly-acquired skill, or the skill about which we are
doubtful, that gives us the thrill of success. That is why the will to
power is so immeasurably adaptable according to the type of skill which
is taught.
Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but
construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more
satisfaction to the person who can achieve it. I shall not attempt to
give a pedantically exact definition of construction and destruction; I
suppose, roughly speaking, we construct when we increase the potential
energy of the system in which we are interested, and we destroy when
we diminish its potential energy. Or, in more psychological terms,
we construct when we produce a predesigned structure, and we destroy
when we liberate natural forces to alter an existing structure,
without being interested in the resulting new structure. Whatever
may be thought of these definitions, we all know in practice whether
an activity is to be regarded as constructive or destructive, except
in a few cases where a man professes to be destroying with a view to
rebuilding and we are not sure whether he is sincere.
Destruction being easier, a child’s games usually begin with it, and
only pass on to construction at a later stage. A child on the sand with
a pail likes grown-up people to make sand-puddings, and then knock them
down with his spade. But as soon as he can make sand-puddings himself,
he delights in doing so, and will not permit them to be knocked down.
When a child first has bricks, he likes to destroy towers built by
his elders. But when he has learnt to build for himself, he becomes
inordinately proud of his performances, and cannot bear to see his
architectural efforts reduced to a heap of ruins. The impulse which
makes the child enjoy the game is exactly the same at both stages, but
new skill has changed the activity resulting from the impulse.
The first beginnings of many virtues arise out of experiencing
the joys of construction. When a child begs you to leave his
constructions undestroyed, you can easily make him understand that he
must not destroy other people’s. In this way you can create respect
for the produce of labour, the only socially innocuous source of
private property. You also give the child an incentive to patience,
persistence, and observation; without these qualities, he will not
succeed in building his tower to the height upon which he had set
his heart. In play with children, you should only construct yourself
sufficiently to stimulate ambition and to show how the thing is done;
after that, construction should be left to their own efforts.
If a child has access to a garden, it is easy to cultivate a more
elaborate form of constructiveness. The first impulse of a child in a
garden is to pick every attractive flower. It is easy to check this
by prohibition, but mere prohibition is inadequate as an education.
One wants to produce in the child the same respect for the garden that
restrains the grown-ups from picking wantonly. The respect of the
grown-up is due to realization of the labour and effort required to
produce the pleasing result. By the time a child is three years old, he
can be given a corner of the garden and encouraged to plant seeds in
it. When they come up and blossom, his own flowers seem precious and
wonderful; then he can appreciate that his mother’s flowers also must
be treated with care.
The elimination of thoughtless cruelty is to be effected most easily by
developing an interest in construction and growth. Almost every child,
as soon as he is old enough, wants to kill flies and other insects;
this leads on to the killing of larger animals, and ultimately of
men. In the ordinary English upper-class family, the killing of birds
is considered highly creditable, and the killing of men in war is
regarded as the noblest of professions. This attitude is in accordance
with untrained instinct: it is that of men who possess no form of
constructive skill, and are therefore unable to find any innocent
embodiment of their will to power. They can make pheasants die and
tenants suffer; when occasion arises, they can shoot a rhinoceros or a
German. But in more useful arts they are entirely deficient, as their
parents and teachers thought it sufficient to make them into English
gentlemen. I do not believe that at birth they are any stupider
than other babies; their deficiencies in later life are entirely
attributable to bad education. If, from an early age, they had been led
to feel the value of life by watching its development with affectionate
proprietorship; if they had acquired forms of constructive skill; if
they had been made to realize with apprehension how quickly and easily
a slow product of anxious solicitude can be destroyed--if all this had
formed part of their early moral training, they would not be so ready
to destroy what others have similarly created or tended. The great
educator in this respect in later life is parenthood, provided the
instinct is adequately aroused. But in the rich this seldom happens,
because they leave the care of their children to paid professionals;
therefore we cannot wait till they become parents before beginning to
eradicate their destructive tendencies.
Every author who has had uneducated housemaids knows that it is
difficult (the public may wish it were impossible) to restrain their
passion for lighting the fire with his manuscripts. A fellow-author,
even if he were a jealous enemy, would not think of doing such a
thing, because experience has taught him the value of manuscripts.
Similarly the boy who has a garden will not trample on other people’s
flower-beds, and the boy who has pets can be taught to respect animal
life. Respect for human life is likely to exist in any one who has
taken trouble over his or her own children. It is the trouble we
take over our children that elicits the stronger forms of parental
affection; in those who avoid this trouble the parental instinct
becomes more or less atrophied, and remains only as a sense of
responsibility. But parents are far more likely to take trouble over
their children if their own constructive impulses have been fully
developed; thus for this reason also it is very desirable to pay
attention to this aspect of education.
When I speak of constructiveness, I am not thinking only of material
construction. Such occupations as acting and choral singing involve
co-operative non-material construction; they are pleasant to many
children and young people, and should be encouraged (though not
enforced). Even in purely intellectual matters it is possible to have
a constructive or a destructive bias. A classical education is almost
entirely critical: a boy learns to avoid mistakes, and to despise those
who commit them. This tends to produce a kind of cold correctness, in
which originality is replaced by respect for authority. Correct Latin
is fixed once for all: it is that of Vergil and Cicero. Correct science
is continually changing, and an able youth may look forward to helping
in this process. Consequently the attitude produced by a scientific
education is likely to be more constructive than that produced by the
study of dead languages. Wherever avoidance of error is the chief thing
aimed at, education tends to produce an intellectually bloodless type.
The prospect of doing something venturesome with one’s knowledge ought
to be held before all the abler young men and young women. Too often,
higher education is regarded as conferring something analogous to
good manners, a merely negative code by which solecisms are avoided.
In such an education, constructiveness has been forgotten. The usual
type produced is, as might be expected, niggling, unenterprising, and
lacking in generosity. All this is avoided when positive achievement is
made the goal of education.
In the later years of education, there should be a stimulation of
social constructiveness. I mean, that those whose intelligence is
adequate should be encouraged in using their imaginations to think out
more productive ways of utilizing existing social forces or creating
new ones. Men read Plato’s “Republic”, but they do not attach it to
current politics at any point. When I stated that the Russian State in
1920 had ideals which were almost exactly those of the “Republic”, it
was hard to say whether the Platonists or the Bolsheviks were the more
shocked. People read a literary classic without any attempt to see
what it means in terms of the lives of Brown, Jones and Robinson. This
is particularly easy with a Utopia, because we are not told of any road
which leads to it from our present social system. The valuable faculty,
in these matters, is that of judging rightly as to the next step.
British nineteenth-century Liberals had this merit, though the ultimate
results to which their measures were bound to lead would have horrified
them. A great deal depends upon the kind of image that dominates a
man’s thinking, often quite unconsciously. A social system may be
conceived in many ways; the commonest are a mould, a machine, and a
tree. The first belongs to the static conceptions of society, such as
those of Sparta and traditional China: human nature is to be poured
into a prepared mould, and to set in a preconceived shape. Something
of this idea exists in any rigid moral or social convention. The man
whose outlook is dominated by this image will have a political outlook
of a certain kind--stiff and unyielding, stern and persecuting. The man
who conceives of society as a machine is more modern. The industrialist
and the communist alike belong to this class. To them, human nature is
uninteresting, and the ends of life are simple--usually the maximizing
of production. The purpose of social organization is to secure these
simple ends. The difficulty is that actual human beings will not
desire them; they persist in wanting all kinds of chaotic things
which seem worthless to the tidy mind of the organizer. This drives
the organizer back to the mould, in order to produce human beings who
desire what he thinks good. And this, in turn, leads to revolution.
The man who imagines a social system as a tree will have a different
political outlook. A bad machine can be scrapped, and another put in
its place. But if a tree is cut down, it is a long time before a new
tree achieves the same strength and size. A machine or a mould is what
its maker chooses; a tree has its specific nature, and can only be made
into a better or worse example of the species. Constructiveness applied
to living things is quite different from constructiveness applied to
machines; it has humbler functions, and requires a sort of sympathy.
For that reason, in teaching constructiveness to the young, they should
have opportunities of exercising it upon plants and animals, not only
upon bricks and machines. Physics has been dominant in thought since
the time of Newton, and in practice since the industrial revolution;
this has brought with it a rather mechanical conception of society.
Biological evolution introduced a new set of ideas, but they were
somewhat overshadowed by natural selection, which it should be our
aim to eliminate from human affairs by eugenics, birth-control, and
education. The conception of society as a tree is better than the mould
or the machine, but it is still defective. It is to psychology that
we must look to supply the deficiency. Psychological constructiveness
is a new and special kind, very little understood as yet. It is
essential to a right theory of education, politics, and all purely
human affairs. And it should dominate the imaginations of citizens,
if they are not to be misled by false analogies. Some people dread
constructiveness in human affairs, because they fear that it must be
mechanical; they therefore believe in anarchism and the “return to
nature”. I am trying in this book to show, in concrete instances, how
psychological construction differs from the construction of a machine.
The imaginative side of this idea ought to be made familiar in higher
education; if it were, I believe that our politics would cease to be
angular and sharp and destructive, becoming instead supple and truly
scientific, with the development of splendid men and women as its goal.