_ON THE VALUE, AS A SOCIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE, OF THE RULE TO MIND ONE'S
OWN BUSINESS._
The passion for dealing with social questions is one of the marks of
our time. Every man gets some experience of, and makes some
observations on social affairs. Except matters of health, probably none
have such general interest as matters of society. Except matters of
health, none are so much afflicted by dogmatism and crude speculation
as those which appertain to society. The amateurs in social science
always ask: What shall we do? What shall we do with Neighbor A? What
shall we do for Neighbor B? What shall we make Neighbor A do for
Neighbor B? It is a fine thing to be planning and discussing broad and
general theories of wide application. The amateurs always plan to use
the individual for some constructive and inferential social purpose, or
to use the society for some constructive and inferential individual
purpose. For A to sit down and think, What shall I do? is commonplace;
but to think what B ought to do is interesting, romantic, moral,
self-flattering, and public-spirited all at once. It satisfies a great
number of human weaknesses at once. To go on and plan what a whole
class of people ought to do is to feel one's self a power on earth, to
win a public position, to clothe one's self in dignity. Hence we have
an unlimited supply of reformers, philanthropists, humanitarians, and
would-be managers-in-general of society.
Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care
of his or her own self. This is a social duty. For, fortunately, the
matter stands so that the duty of making the best of one's self
individually is not a separate thing from the duty of filling one's
place in society, but the two are one, and the latter is accomplished
when the former is done. The common notion, however, seems to be that
one has a duty to society, as a special and separate thing, and that
this duty consists in considering and deciding what other people ought
to do. Now, the man who can do anything for or about anybody else than
himself is fit to be head of a family; and when he becomes head of a
family he has duties to his wife and his children, in addition to the
former big duty. Then, again, any man who can take care of himself and
his family is in a very exceptional position, if he does not find in
his immediate surroundings people who need his care and have some sort
of a personal claim upon him. If, now, he is able to fulfill all this,
and to take care of anybody outside his family and his dependents, he
must have a surplus of energy, wisdom, and moral virtue beyond what he
needs for his own business. No man has this; for a family is a charge
which is capable of infinite development, and no man could suffice to
the full measure of duty for which a family may draw upon him. Neither
can a man give to society so advantageous an employment of his
services, whatever they are, in any other way as by spending them on
his family. Upon this, however, I will not insist. I recur to the
observation that a man who proposes to take care of other people must
have himself and his family taken care of, after some sort of a
fashion, and must have an as yet unexhausted store of energy.
The danger of minding other people's business is twofold. First, there
is the danger that a man may leave his own business unattended to; and,
second, there is the danger of an impertinent interference with
another's affairs. The "friends of humanity" almost always run into
both dangers. I am one of humanity, and I do not want any volunteer
friends. I regard friendship as mutual, and I want to have my say about
it. I suppose that other components of humanity feel in the same way
about it. If so, they must regard any one who assumes the _rôle_ of a
friend of humanity as impertinent. The reference to the friend of
humanity back to his own business is obviously the next step.
Yet we are constantly annoyed, and the legislatures are kept
constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is
wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want
to compel everybody else to live in their way. Some people have decided
to spend Sunday in a certain way, and they want laws passed to make
other people spend Sunday in the same way. Some people have resolved to
be teetotalers, and they want a law passed to make everybody else a
teetotaler. Some people have resolved to eschew luxury, and they want
taxes laid to make others eschew luxury. The taxing power is especially
something after which the reformer's finger always itches. Sometimes
there is an element of self-interest in the proposed reformation, as
when a publisher wanted a duty imposed on books, to keep Americans from
reading books which would unsettle their Americanisms; and when artists
wanted a tax laid on pictures, to save Americans from buying bad
paintings.
I make no reference here to the giving and taking of counsel and aid
between man and man: of that I shall say something in the last chapter.
The very sacredness of the relation in which two men stand to one
another when one of them rescues the other from vice separates that
relation from any connection with the work of the social busybody, the
professional philanthropist, and the empirical legislator.
The amateur social doctors are like the amateur physicians--they always
begin with the question of _remedies_, and they go at this without any
diagnosis or any knowledge of the anatomy or physiology of society.
They never have any doubt of the efficacy of their remedies. They never
take account of any ulterior effects which may be apprehended from the
remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit that their remedy
implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution
of human nature. Against all such social quackery the obvious
injunction to the quacks is, to mind their own business.
The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be
more moral or more enlightened than their fellow-men. They are able to
see what other men ought to do when the other men do not see it. An
examination of the work of the social doctors, however, shows that they
are only more ignorant and more presumptuous than other people. We have
a great many social difficulties and hardships to contend with.
Poverty, pain, disease, and misfortune surround our existence. We fight
against them all the time. The individual is a centre of hopes,
affections, desires, and sufferings. When he dies, life changes its
form, but does not cease. That means that the person--the centre of all
the hopes, affections, etc.--after struggling as long as he can, is
sure to succumb at last. We would, therefore, as far as the hardships
of the human lot are concerned, go on struggling to the best of our
ability against them but for the social doctors, and we would endure
what we could not cure. But we have inherited a vast number of social
ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of
all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the
past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit,
fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in
political economy and social science. It is a fact worth noticing, just
when there seems to be a revival of faith in legislative agencies, that
our States are generally providing against the experienced evils of
over-legislation by ordering that the Legislature shall sit only every
other year. During the hard times, when Congress had a real chance to
make or mar the public welfare, the final adjournment of that body was
hailed year after year with cries of relief from a great anxiety. The
greatest reforms which could now be accomplished would consist in
undoing the work of statesmen in the past, and the greatest difficulty
in the way of reform is to find out how to undo their work without
injury to what is natural and sound. All this mischief has been done
by men who sat down to consider the problem (as I heard an apprentice
of theirs once express it), What kind of a society do we want to make?
When they had settled this question _a priori_ to their satisfaction,
they set to work to make their ideal society, and today we suffer the
consequences. Human society tries hard to adapt itself to any
conditions in which it finds itself, and we have been warped and
distorted until we have got used to it, as the foot adapts itself to an
ill-made boot. Next, we have come to think that that is the right way
for things to be; and it is true that a change to a sound and normal
condition would for a time hurt us, as a man whose foot has been
distorted would suffer if he tried to wear a well-shaped boot. Finally,
we have produced a lot of economists and social philosophers who have
invented sophisms for fitting our thinking to the distorted facts.
Society, therefore, does not need any care or supervision. If we can
acquire a science of society, based on observation of phenomena and
study of forces, we may hope to gain some ground slowly toward the
elimination of old errors and the re-establishment of a sound and
natural social order. Whatever we gain that way will be by growth,
never in the world by any reconstruction of society on the plan of
some enthusiastic social architect. The latter is only repeating the
old error over again, and postponing all our chances of real
improvement. Society needs first of all to be freed from these
meddlers--that is, to be let alone. Here we are, then, once more back
at the old doctrine--_Laissez faire_. Let us translate it into blunt
English, and it will read, Mind your own business. It is nothing but
the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way. If his
sphere of action and interest impinges on that of any other man, there
will have to be compromise and adjustment. Wait for the occasion. Do
not attempt to generalize those interferences or to plan for them _a
priori_. We have a body of laws and institutions which have grown up as
occasion has occurred for adjusting rights. Let the same process go on.
Practise the utmost reserve possible in your interferences even of this
kind, and by no means seize occasion for interfering with natural
adjustments. Try first long and patiently whether the natural
adjustment will not come about through the play of interests and the
voluntary concessions of the parties.
I have said that we have an empirical political economy and social
science to fit the distortions of our society. The test of empiricism
in this matter is the attitude which one takes up toward _laissez
faire_. It no doubt wounds the vanity of a philosopher who is just
ready with a new solution of the universe to be told to mind his own
business. So he goes on to tell us that if we think that we shall, by
being let alone, attain a perfect happiness on earth, we are mistaken.
The half-way men--the professional socialists--join him. They solemnly
shake their heads, and tell us that he is right--that letting us alone
will never secure us perfect happiness. Under all this lies the
familiar logical fallacy, never expressed, but really the point of the
whole, that we _shall_ get perfect happiness if we put ourselves in the
hands of the world-reformer. We never supposed that _laissez faire_
would give us perfect happiness. We have left perfect happiness
entirely out of our account. If the social doctors will mind their own
business, we shall have no troubles but what belong to Nature. Those we
will endure or combat as we can. What we desire is, that the friends of
humanity should cease to add to them. Our disposition toward the ills
which our fellow-man inflicts on us through malice or meddling is quite
different from our disposition toward the ills which are inherent in
the conditions of human life.
To mind one's own business is a purely negative and unproductive
injunction, but, taking social matters as they are just now, it is a
sociological principle of the first importance. There might be
developed a grand philosophy on the basis of minding one's own
business.