Produced by Russell Bell
The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion
by
George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950)
Writing as: JOHN TANNER, M.I.R.C. (Member of the Idle Rich Class).
PREFACE TO THE REVOLUTIONIST'S HANDBOOK
"No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of the
people without desiring something like a revolution for the better."
Sir Robert Giffen. Essays in Finance, vol. ii. p. 393.
FOREWORD
A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order
and try another.
The constitution of England is revolutionary. To a Russian or
Anglo-Indian bureaucrat, a general election is as much a revolution as a
referendum or plebiscite in which the people fight instead of voting.
The French Revolution overthrew one set of rulers and substituted
another with different interests and different views. That is what a
general election enables the people to do in England every seven years
if they choose. Revolution is therefore a national institution in
England; and its advocacy by an Englishman needs no apology.
Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For
example, every person who has mastered a profession is a sceptic
concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.
Every genuine religious person is a heretic and therefore a
revolutionist.
All who achieve real distinction in life begin as revolutionists. The
most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older,
though they are commonly supposed to become more conservative owing to
their loss of faith in conventional methods of reform.
Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of the
existing social order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior.
AND YET
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only
shifted it to another shoulder.
JOHN TANNER
I
ON GOOD BREEDING
If there were no God, said the eighteenth century Deist, it would be
necessary to invent Him. Now this XVIII century god was deus ex
machina, the god who helped those who could not help themselves, the god
of the lazy and incapable. The nineteenth century decided that there is
indeed no such god; and now Man must take in hand all the work that he
used to shirk with an idle prayer. He must, in effect, change himself
into the political Providence which he formerly conceived as god; and
such change is not only possible, but the only sort of change that is
real. The mere transfiguration of institutions, as from military and
priestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, from
commercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom,
from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism, from
polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from atheism to
pantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general
literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to mysticism, from
metaphysics to physics, are all but changes from Tweedledum to
Tweedledee: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. But the changes
from the crab apple to the pippin, from the wolf and fox to the house
dog, from the charger of Henry V to the brewer's draught horse and the
race-horse, are real; for here Man has played the god, subduing Nature
to his intention, and ennobling or debasing Life for a set purpose. And
what can be done with a wolf can be done with a man. If such monsters
as the tramp and the gentleman can appear as mere by-products of Man's
individual greed and folly, what might we not hope for as a main product
of his universal aspiration?
This is no new conclusion. The despair of institutions, and the
inexorable "ye must be born again," with Mrs Poyser's stipulation, "and
born different," recurs in every generation. The cry for the Superman
did not begin with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue. But it
has always been silenced by the same question: what kind of person is
this Superman to be? You ask, not for a super-apple, but for an eatable
apple; not for a superhorse, but for a horse of greater draught or
velocity. Neither is it of any use to ask for a Superman: you must
furnish a specification of the sort of man you want. Unfortunately you
do not know what sort of man you want. Some sort of goodlooking
philosopher-athlete, with a handsome healthy woman for his mate,
perhaps.
Vague as this is, it is a great advance on the popular demand for a
perfect gentleman and a perfect lady. And, after all, no market demand
in the world takes the form of exact technical specification of the
article required. Excellent poultry and potatoes are produced to
satisfy the demand of housewives who do not know the technical
differences between a tuber and a chicken. They will tell you that the
proof of the pudding is in the eating; and they are right. The proof of
the Superman will be in the living; and we shall find out how to produce
him by the old method of trial and error, and not by waiting for a
completely convincing prescription of his ingredients.
Certain common and obvious mistakes may be ruled out from the beginning.
For example, we agree that we want superior mind; but we need not fall
into the football club folly of counting on this as a product of
superior body. Yet if we recoil so far as to conclude that superior
mind consists in being the dupe of our ethical classifications of
virtues and vices, in short, of conventional morality, we shall fall out
of the fryingpan of the football club into the fire of the Sunday
School. If we must choose between a race of athletes and a race of
"good" men, let us have the athletes: better Samson and Milo than Calvin
and Robespierre. But neither alternative is worth changing for: Samson
is no more a Superman than Calvin. What then are we to do?
II
PROPERTY AND MARRIAGE
Let us hurry over the obstacles set up by property and marriage.
Revolutionists make too much of them. No doubt it is easy to
demonstrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys
it. No doubt, also, property has hitherto held its own and destroyed
all the empires. But that was because the superficial objection to it
(that it distributes social wealth and the social labor burden in a
grotesquely inequitable manner) did not threaten the existence of the
race, but only the individual happiness of its units, and finally the
maintenance of some irrelevant political form or other, such as a
nation, an empire, or the like. Now as happiness never matters to
Nature, as she neither recognizes flags and frontiers nor cares a straw
whether the economic system adopted by a society is feudal,
capitalistic, or collectivist, provided it keeps the race afoot (the
hive and the anthill being as acceptable to her as Utopia), the
demonstrations of Socialists, though irrefutable, will never make any
serious impression on property. The knell of that over-rated
institution will not sound until it is felt to conflict with some more
vital matter than mere personal inequities in industrial economy. No
such conflict was perceived whilst society had not yet grown beyond
national communities too small and simple to overtax Man's limited
political capacity disastrously. But we have now reached the stage of
international organization. Man's political capacity and magnanimity
are clearly beaten by the vastness and complexity of the problems forced
on him. And it is at this anxious moment that he finds, when he looks
upward for a mightier mind to help him, that the heavens are empty. He
will presently see that his discarded formula that Man is the Temple of
the Holy Ghost happens to be precisely true, and that it is only through
his own brain and hand that this Holy Ghost, formally the most nebulous
person in the Trinity, and now become its sole survivor as it has always
been its real Unity, can help him in any way. And so, if the Superman
is to come, he must be born of Woman by Man's intentional and
well-considered contrivance. Conviction of this will smash everything
that opposes it. Even Property and Marriage, which laugh at the
laborer's petty complaint that he is defrauded of "surplus value," and
at the domestic miseries of the slaves of the wedding ring, will
themselves be laughed aside as the lightest of trifles if they cross
this conception when it becomes a fully realized vital purpose of the
race.
That they must cross it becomes obvious the moment we acknowledge the
futility of breeding men for special qualities as we breed cocks for
game, greyhounds for speed, or sheep for mutton. What is really
important in Man is the part of him that we do not yet understand. Of
much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally
conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we
neglect it we die. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that when
we have carried selection as far as we can by rejecting from the list of
eligible parents all persons who are uninteresting, unpromising, or
blemished without any set-off, we shall still have to trust to the
guidance of fancy (alias Voice of Nature), both in the breeders and the
parents, for that superiority in the unconscious self which will be the
true characteristic of the Superman.
At this point we perceive the importance of giving fancy the widest
possible field. To cut humanity up into small cliques, and effectively
limit the selection of the individual to his own clique, is to postpone
the Superman for eons, if not for ever. Not only should every person be
nourished and trained as a possible parent, but there should be no
possibility of such an obstacle to natural selection as the objection of
a countess to a navvy or of a duke to a charwoman. Equality is
essential to good breeding; and equality, as all economists know, is
incompatible with property.
Besides, equality is an essential condition of bad breeding also; and
bad breeding is indispensable to the weeding out of the human race.
When the conception of heredity took hold of the scientific imagination
in the middle of last century, its devotees announced that it was a
crime to marry the lunatic to the lunatic or the consumptive to the
consumptive. But pray are we to try to correct our diseased stocks by
infecting our healthy stocks with them? Clearly the attraction which
disease has for diseased people is beneficial to the race. If two
really unhealthy people get married, they will, as likely as not, have a
great number of children who will all die before they reach maturity.
This is a far more satisfactory arrangement than the tragedy of a union
between a healthy and an unhealthy person. Though more costly than
sterilization of the unhealthy, it has the enormous advantage that in
the event of our notions of health and unhealth being erroneous (which
to some extent they most certainly are), the error will be corrected by
experience instead of confirmed by evasion.
One fact must be faced resolutely, in spite of the shrieks of the
romantic. There is no evidence that the best citizens are the offspring
of congenial marriages, or that a conflict of temperament is not a
highly important part of what breeders call crossing. On the contrary,
it is quite sufficiently probable that good results may be obtained from
parents who would be extremely unsuitable companions and partners, to
make it certain that the experiment of mating them will sooner or later
be tried purposely almost as often as it is now tried accidentally. But
mating such couples must clearly not involve marrying them. In
conjugation two complementary persons may supply one another's
deficiencies: in the domestic partnership of marriage they only feel
them and suffer from them. Thus the son of a robust, cheerful, eupeptic
British country squire, with the tastes and range of his class, and of a
clever, imaginative, intellectual, highly civilized Jewess, might be
very superior to both his parents; but it is not likely that the Jewess
would find the squire an interesting companion, or his habits, his
friends, his place and mode of life congenial to her. Therefore
marriage, whilst it is made an indispensable condition of mating, will
delay the advent of the Superman as effectually as Property, and will be
modified by the impulse towards him just as effectually.
The practical abrogation of Property and Marriage as they exist at
present will occur without being much noticed. To the mass of men, the
intelligent abolition of property would mean nothing except an increase
in the quantity of food, clothing, housing, and comfort at their
personal disposal, as well as a greater control over their time and
circumstances. Very few persons now make any distinction between
virtually complete property and property held on such highly developed
public conditions as to place its income on the same footing as that of
a propertyless clergyman, officer, or civil servant. A landed
proprietor may still drive men and women off his land, demolish their
dwellings, and replace them with sheep or deer; and in the unregulated
trades the private trader may still spunge on the regulated trades and
sacrifice the life and health of the nation as lawlessly as the
Manchester cotton manufacturers did at the beginning of last century.
But though the Factory Code on the one hand, and Trade Union
organization on the other, have, within the lifetime of men still
living, converted the old unrestricted property of the cotton
manufacturer in his mill and the cotton spinner in his labor into a mere
permission to trade or work on stringent public or collective
conditions, imposed in the interest of the general welfare without any
regard for individual hard cases, people in Lancashire still speak of
their "property" in the old terms, meaning nothing more by it than the
things a thief can be punished for stealing. The total abolition of
property, and the conversion of every citizen into a salaried
functionary in the public service, would leave much more than 99 per
cent of the nation quite unconscious of any greater change than now
takes place when the son of a shipowner goes into the navy. They would
still call their watches and umbrellas and back gardens their property.
Marriage also will persist as a name attached to a general custom long
after the custom itself will have altered. For example, modern English
marriage, as modified by divorce and by Married Women's Property Acts,
differs more from early XIX century marriage than Byron's marriage did
from Shakespear's. At the present moment marriage in England differs
not only from marriage in France, but from marriage in Scotland.
Marriage as modified by the divorce laws in South Dakota would be called
mere promiscuity in Clapham. Yet the Americans, far from taking a
profligate and cynical view of marriage, do homage to its ideals with a
seriousness that seems old fashioned in Clapham. Neither in England nor
America would a proposal to abolish marriage be tolerated for a moment;
and yet nothing is more certain than that in both countries the
progressive modification of the marriage contract will be continued
until it is no more onerous nor irrevocable than any ordinary commercial
deed of partnership. Were even this dispensed with, people would still
call themselves husbands and wives; describe their companionships as
marriages; and be for the most part unconscious that they were any less
married than Henry VIII. For though a glance at the legal conditions of
marriage in different Christian countries shews that marriage varies
legally from frontier to frontier, domesticity varies so little that
most people believe their own marriage laws to be universal.
Consequently here again, as in the case of Property, the absolute
confidence of the public in the stability of the institution's name,
makes it all the easier to alter its substance.
However, it cannot be denied that one of the changes in public opinion
demanded by the need for the Superman is a very unexpected one. It is
nothing less than the dissolution of the present necessary association
of marriage with conjugation, which most unmarried people regard as the
very diagnostic of marriage. They are wrong, of course: it would be
quite as near the truth to say that conjugation is the one purely
accidental and incidental condition of marriage. Conjugation is
essential to nothing but the propagation of the race; and the moment
that paramount need is provided for otherwise than by marriage,
conjugation, from Nature's creative point of view, ceases to be
essential in marriage. But marriage does not thereupon cease to be so
economical, convenient, and comfortable, that the Superman might safely
bribe the matrimonomaniacs by offering to revive all the old inhuman
stringency and irrevocability of marriage, to abolish divorce, to
confirm the horrible bond which still chains decent people to drunkards,
criminals, and wasters, provided only the complete extrication of
conjugation from it were conceded to him. For if people could form
domestic companionships on no easier terms than these, they would still
marry. The Roman Catholic, forbidden by his Church to avail himself of
the divorce laws, marries as freely as the South Dakotan Presbyterians
who can change partners with a facility that scandalizes the old world;
and were his Church to dare a further step towards Christianity and
enjoin celibacy on its laity as well as on its clergy, marriages would
still be contracted for the sake of domesticity by perfectly obedient
sons and daughters of the Church. One need not further pursue these
hypotheses: they are only suggested here to help the reader to analyse
marriage into its two functions of regulating conjugation and supplying
a form of domesticity. These two functions are quite separable; and
domesticity is the only one of the two which is essential to the
existence of marriage, because conjugation without domesticity is not
marriage at all, whereas domesticity without conjugation is still
marriage: in fact it is necessarily the actual condition of all fertile
marriages during a great part of their duration, and of some marriages
during the whole of it.
Taking it, then, that Property and Marriage, by destroying Equality and
thus hampering sexual selection with irrelevant conditions, are hostile
to the evolution of the Superman, it is easy to understand why the only
generally known modern experiment in breeding the human race took place
in a community which discarded both institutions.
III
THE PERFECTIONIST EXPERIMENT AT ONEIDA CREEK
In 1848 the Oneida Community was founded in America to carry out a
resolution arrived at by a handful of Perfectionist Communists "that we
will devote ourselves exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom of
God." Though the American nation declared that this sort of thing was
not to be tolerated in a Christian country, the Oneida Community held
its own for over thirty years, during which period it seems to have
produced healthier children and done and suffered less evil than any
Joint Stock Company on record. It was, however, a highly selected
community; for a genuine communist (roughly definable as an intensely
proud person who proposes to enrich the common fund instead of to spunge
on it) is superior to an ordinary joint stock capitalist precisely as an
ordinary joint stock capitalist is superior to a pirate. Further, the
Perfectionists were mightily shepherded by their chief Noyes, one of
those chance attempts at the Superman which occur from time to time in
spite of the interference of Man's blundering institutions. The
existence of Noyes simplified the breeding problem for the Communists,
the question as to what sort of man they should strive to breed being
settled at once by the obvious desirability of breeding another Noyes.
But an experiment conducted by a handful of people, who, after thirty
years of immunity from the unintentional child slaughter that goes on by
ignorant parents in private homes, numbered only 300, could do very
little except prove that Communists, under the guidance of a Superman
"devoted exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom of God," and
caring no more for property and marriage than a Camberwell minister
cares for Hindoo Caste or Suttee, might make a much better job of their
lives than ordinary folk under the harrow of both these institutions.
Yet their Superman himself admitted that this apparent success was only
part of the abnormal phenomenon of his own occurrence; for when he came
to the end of his powers through age, he himself guided and organized
the voluntary relapse of the communists into marriage, capitalism, and
customary private life, thus admitting that the real social solution was
not what a casual Superman could persuade a picked company to do for
him, but what a whole community of Supermen would do spontaneously. If
Noyes had had to organize, not a few dozen Perfectionists, but the whole
United States, America would have beaten him as completely as England
beat Oliver Cromwell, France Napoleon, or Rome Julius Cæsar. Cromwell
learnt by bitter experience that God himself cannot raise a people above
its own level, and that even though you stir a nation to sacrifice all
its appetites to its conscience, the result will still depend wholly on
what sort of conscience the nation has got. Napoleon seems to have
ended by regarding mankind as a troublesome pack of hounds only worth
keeping for the sport of hunting with them. Cæsar's capacity for
fighting without hatred or resentment was defeated by the determination
of his soldiers to kill their enemies in the field instead of taking
them prisoners to be spared by Cæsar; and his civil supremacy was
purchased by colossal bribery of the citizens of Rome. What great
rulers cannot do, codes and religions cannot do. Man reads his own
nature into every ordinance: if you devise a superhuman commandment so
cunningly that it cannot be misinterpreted in terms of his will, he will
denounce it as seditious blasphemy, or else disregard it as either crazy
or totally unintelligible. Parliaments and synods may tinker as much as
they please with their codes and creeds as circumstances alter the
balance of classes and their interests; and, as a result of the
tinkering, there may be an occasional illusion of moral evolution, as
when the victory of the commercial caste over the military caste leads
to the substitution of social boycotting and pecuniary damages for
duelling. At certain moments there may even be a considerable material
advance, as when the conquest of political power by the working class
produces a better distribution of wealth through the simple action of
the selfishness of the new masters; but all this is mere readjustment
and reformation: until the heart and mind of the people is changed the
very greatest man will no more dare to govern on the assumption that all
are as great as he than a drover dare leave his flock to find its way
through the streets as he himself would. Until there is an England in
which every man is a Cromwell, a France in which every man is a
Napoleon, a Rome in which every man is a Cæsar, a Germany in which every
man is a Luther plus a Goethe, the world will be no more improved by its
heroes than a Brixton villa is improved by the pyramid of Cheops. The
production of such nations is the only real change possible to us.
IV
MAN'S OBJECTION TO HIS OWN IMPROVEMENT
But would such a change be tolerated if Man must rise above himself to
desire it? It would, through his misconception of its nature. Man does
desire an ideal Superman with such energy as he can spare from his
nutrition, and has in every age magnified the best living substitute for
it he can find. His least incompetent general is set up as an
Alexander; his king is the first gentleman in the world; his Pope is a
saint. He is never without an array of human idols who are all nothing
but sham Supermen. That the real Superman will snap his superfingers at
all Man's present trumpery ideals of right, duty, honor, justice,
religion, even decency, and accept moral obligations beyond present
human endurance, is a thing that contemporary Man does not foresee: in
fact he does not notice it when our casual Supermen do it in his very
face. He actually does it himself every day without knowing it. He
will therefore make no objection to the production of a race of what he
calls Great Men or Heroes, because he will imagine them, not as true
Supermen, but as himself endowed with infinite brains, infinite courage,
and infinite money.
The most troublesome opposition will arise from the general fear of
mankind that any interference with our conjugal customs will be an
interference with our pleasures and our romance. This fear, by putting
on airs of offended morality, has always intimidated people who have not
measured its essential weakness; but it will prevail with those
degenerates only in whom the instinct of fertility has faded into a mere
itching for pleasure. The modern devices for combining pleasure with
sterility, now universally known and accessible, enable these persons to
weed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work;
and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the
survival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed is
nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost
unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious
fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the
evolutionary process.[1] Even if this selective agency had not been
invented, the purpose of the race would still shatter the opposition of
individual instincts. Not only do the bees and the ants satisfy their
reproductive and parental instincts vicariously; but marriage itself
successfully imposes celibacy on millions of unmarried normal men and
women. In short, the individual instinct in this matter, overwhelming
as it is thoughtlessly supposed to be, is really a finally negligible
one.
[1] The part played in evolution by the voluptuary will be the same as
that already played by the glutton. The glutton, as the man with the
strongest motive for nourishing himself, will always take more pains
than his fellows to get food. When food is so difficult to get that
only great exertions can secure a sufficient supply of it, the glutton's
appetite develops his cunning and enterprise to the utmost; and he
becomes not only the best fed but the ablest man in the community. But
in more hospitable climates, or where the social organization of the
food supply makes it easy for a man to overeat, then the glutton eats
himself out of health and finally out of existence. All other
voluptuaries prosper and perish in the same way; way; and this is why
the survival of the fittest means finally the survival of the
self-controlled, because they alone can adapt themselves to the
perpetual shifting of conditions produced by industrial progress.
V
THE POLITICAL NEED FOR THE SUPERMAN
The need for the Superman is, in its most imperative aspect, a political
one. We have been driven to Proletarian Democracy by the failure of all
the alternative systems; for these depended on the existence of Supermen
acting as despots or oligarchs; and not only were these Supermen not
always or even often forthcoming at the right moment and in an eligible
social position, but when they were forthcoming they could not, except
for a short time and by morally suicidal coercive methods, impose
superhumanity on those whom they governed; so, by mere force of "human
nature," government by consent of the governed has supplanted the old
plan of governing the citizen as a public-schoolboy is governed.
Now we have yet to see the man who, having any practical experience of
Proletarian Democracy, has any belief in its capacity for solving great
political problems, or even for doing ordinary parochial work
intelligently and economically. Only under despotisms and oligarchies
has the Radical faith in "universal suffrage" as a political panacea
arisen. It withers the moment it is exposed to practical trial, because
Democracy cannot rise above the level of the human material of which its
voters are made. Switzerland seems happy in comparison with Russia; but
if Russia were as small as Switzerland, and had her social problems
simplified in the same way by impregnable natural fortifications and a
population educated by the same variety and intimacy of international
intercourse, there might be little to choose between them. At all
events Australia and Canada, which are virtually protected democratic
republics, and France and the United States, which are avowedly
independent democratic republics, are neither healthy, wealthy, nor
wise; and they would be worse instead of better if their popular
ministers were not experts in the art of dodging popular enthusiasms and
duping popular ignorance. The politician who once had to learn how to
flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug,
frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate; and though in
advanced modern States, where the artizan is better educated than the
King, it takes a much bigger man to be a successful demagogue than to be
a successful courtier, yet he who holds popular convictions with
prodigious energy is the man for the mob, whilst the frailer sceptic who
is cautiously feeling his way towards the next century has no chance
unless he happens by accident to have the specific artistic talent of
the mountebank as well, in which case it is as a mountebank that he
catches votes, and not as a meliorist. Consequently the demagogue,
though he professes (and fails) to readjust matters in the interests of
the majority of the electors, yet stereotypes mediocrity, organizes
intolerance, disparages exhibitions of uncommon qualities, and glorifies
conspicuous exhibitions of common ones. He manages a small job well: he
muddles rhetorically through a large one. When a great political
movement takes place, it is not consciously led nor organized: the
unconscious self in mankind breaks its way through the problem as an
elephant breaks through a jungle; and the politicians make speeches
about whatever happens in the process, which, with the best intentions,
they do all in their power to prevent. Finally, when social aggregation
arrives at a point demanding international organization before the
demagogues and electorates have learnt how to manage even a country
parish properly much less internationalize Constantinople, the whole
political business goes to smash; and presently we have Ruins of
Empires, New Zealanders sitting on a broken arch of London Bridge, and
so forth.
To that recurrent catastrophe we shall certainly come again unless we
can have a Democracy of Supermen; and the production of such a Democracy
is the only change that is now hopeful enough to nerve us to the effort
that Revolution demands.
VI
PRUDERY EXPLAINED
Why the bees should pamper their mothers whilst we pamper only our
operatic prima donnas is a question worth reflecting on. Our notion of
treating a mother is, not to increase her supply of food, but to cut it
off by forbidding her to work in a factory for a month after her
confinement. Everything that can make birth a misfortune to the parents
as well as a danger to the mother is conscientiously done. When a great
French writer, Emil Zola, alarmed at the sterilization of his nation,
wrote an eloquent and powerful book to restore the prestige of
parentage, it was at once assumed in England that a work of this
character, with such a title as Fecundity, was too abominable to be
translated, and that any attempt to deal with the relations of the sexes
from any other than the voluptuary or romantic point of view must be
sternly put down. Now if this assumption were really founded on public
opinion, it would indicate an attitude of disgust and resentment towards
the Life Force that could only arise in a diseased and moribund
community in which Ibsen's Hedda Gabler would be the typical woman. But
it has no vital foundation at all. The prudery of the newspapers is,
like the prudery of the dinner table, a mere difficulty of education and
language. We are not taught to think decently on these subjects, and
consequently we have no language for them except indecent language. We
therefore have to declare them unfit for public discussion, because the
only terms in which we can conduct the discussion are unfit for public
use. Physiologists, who have a technical vocabulary at their disposal,
find no difficulty; and masters of language who think decently can write
popular stories like Zola's Fecundity or Tolstoy's Resurrection without
giving the smallest offence to readers who can also think decently. But
the ordinary modern journalist, who has never discussed such matters
except in ribaldry, cannot write a simple comment on a divorce case
without a conscious shamefulness or a furtive facetiousness that makes
it impossible to read the comment aloud in company. All this ribaldry
and prudery (the two are the same) does not mean that people do not feel
decently on the subject: on the contrary, it is just the depth and
seriousness of our feeling that makes its desecration by vile language
and coarse humor intolerable; so that at last we cannot bear to have it
spoken of at all because only one in a thousand can speak of it without
wounding our self-respect, especially the self-respect of women. Add to
the horrors of popular language the horrors of popular poverty. In
crowded populations poverty destroys the possibility of cleanliness; and
in the absence of cleanliness many of the natural conditions of life
become offensive and noxious, with the result that at last the
association of uncleanliness with these natural conditions becomes so
overpowering that among civilized people (that is, people massed in the
labyrinths of slums we call cities), half their bodily life becomes a
guilty secret, unmentionable except to the doctor in emergencies; and
Hedda Gabler shoots herself because maternity is so unladylike. In
short, popular prudery is only a mere incident of popular squalor: the
subjects which it taboos remain the most interesting and earnest of
subjects in spite of it.
VII
PROGRESS AN ILLUSION
Unfortunately the earnest people get drawn off the track of evolution by
the illusion of progress. Any Socialist can convince us easily that the
difference between Man as he is and Man as he might become, without
further evolution, under millennial conditions of nutrition,
environment, and training, is enormous. He can shew that inequality and
iniquitous distribution of wealth and allotment of labor have arisen
through an unscientific economic system, and that Man, faulty as he is,
no more intended to establish any such ordered disorder than a moth
intends to be burnt when it flies into a candle flame. He can shew that
the difference between the grace and strength of the acrobat and the
bent back of the rheumatic field laborer is a difference produced by
conditions, not by nature. He can shew that many of the most detestable
human vices are not radical, but are mere reactions of our institutions
on our very virtues. The Anarchist, the Fabian, the Salvationist, the
Vegetarian, the doctor, the lawyer, the parson, the professor of ethics,
the gymnast, the soldier, the sportsman, the inventor, the political
program-maker, all have some prescription for bettering us; and almost
all their remedies are physically possible and aimed at admitted evils.
To them the limit of progress is, at worst, the completion of all the
suggested reforms and the levelling up of all men to the point attained
already by the most highly nourished and cultivated in mind and body.
Here, then, as it seems to them, is an enormous field for the energy of
the reformer. Here are many noble goals attainable by many of those
paths up the Hill Difficulty along which great spirits love to aspire.
Unhappily, the hill will never be climbed by Man as we know him. It
need not be denied that if we all struggled bravely to the end of the
reformers' paths we should improve the world prodigiously. But there is
no more hope in that If than in the equally plausible assurance that if
the sky falls we shall all catch larks. We are not going to tread those
paths: we have not sufficient energy. We do not desire the end enough:
indeed in more cases we do not effectively desire it at all. Ask any
man would he like to be a better man; and he will say yes, most piously.
Ask him would he like to have a million of money; and he will say yes,
most sincerely. But the pious citizen who would like to be a better man
goes on behaving just as he did before. And the tramp who would like
the million does not take the trouble to earn ten shillings: multitudes
of men and women, all eager to accept a legacy of a million, live and
die without having ever possessed five pounds at one time, although
beggars have died in rags on mattresses stuffed with gold which they
accumulated because they desired it enough to nerve them to get it and
keep it. The economists who discovered that demand created supply soon
had to limit the proposition to "effective demand," which turned out, in
the final analysis, to mean nothing more than supply itself; and this
holds good in politics, morals, and all other departments as well: the
actual supply is the measure of the effective demand; and the mere
aspirations and professions produce nothing. No community has ever yet
passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism
enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop
a commercial civilization. Even these stages have never been attained
by public spirit, but always by intolerant wilfulness and brute force.
Take the Reform Bill of 1832 as an example of a conflict between two
sections of educated Englishmen concerning a political measure which was
as obviously necessary and inevitable as any political measure has ever
been or is ever likely to be. It was not passed until the gentlemen of
Birmingham had made arrangements to cut the throats of the gentlemen of
St. James's parish in due military form. It would not have been passed
to this day if there had been no force behind it except the logic and
public conscience of the Utilitarians. A despotic ruler with as much
sense as Queen Elizabeth would have done better than the mob of grown-up
Eton boys who governed us then by privilege, and who, since the
introduction of practically Manhood Suffrage in 1884, now govern us at
the request of proletarian Democracy.
At the present time we have, instead of the Utilitarians, the Fabian
Society, with its peaceful, constitutional, moral, economical policy of
Socialism, which needs nothing for its bloodless and benevolent
realization except that the English people shall understand it and
approve of it. But why are the Fabians well spoken of in circles where
thirty years ago the word Socialist was understood as equivalent to
cut-throat and incendiary? Not because the English have the smallest
intention of studying or adopting the Fabian policy, but because they
believe that the Fabians, by eliminating the element of intimidation
from the Socialist agitation, have drawn the teeth of insurgent poverty
and saved the existing order from the only method of attack it really
fears. Of course, if the nation adopted the Fabian policy, it would be
carried out by brute force exactly as our present property system is.
It would become the law; and those who resisted it would be fined, sold
up, knocked on the head by policemen, thrown into prison, and in the
last resort "executed" just as they are when they break the present law.
But as our proprietary class has no fear of that conversion taking
place, whereas it does fear sporadic cut-throats and gunpowder plots,
and strives with all its might to hide the fact that there is no moral
difference whatever between the methods by which it enforces its
proprietary rights and the method by which the dynamitard asserts his
conception of natural human rights, the Fabian Society is patted on the
back just as the Christian Social Union is, whilst the Socialist who
says bluntly that a Social revolution can be made only as all other
revolutions have been made, by the people who want it killing, coercing,
and intimidating the people who dont want it, is denounced as a
misleader of the people, and imprisoned with hard labor to shew him how
much sincerity there is in the objection of his captors to physical
force.
Are we then to repudiate Fabian methods, and return to those of the
barricader, or adopt those of the dynamitard and the assassin? On the
contrary, we are to recognize that both are fundamentally futile. It
seems easy for the dynamitard to say "Have you not just admitted that
nothing is ever conceded except to physical force? Did not Gladstone
admit that the Irish Church was disestablished, not by the spirit of
Liberalism, but by the explosion which wrecked Clerkenwell prison?"
Well, we need not foolishly and timidly deny it. Let it be fully
granted. Let us grant, further, that all this lies in the nature of
things; that the most ardent Socialist, if he owns property, can by no
means do otherwise than Conservative proprietors until property is
forcibly abolished by the whole nation; nay, that ballots, and
parliamentary divisions, in spite of their vain ceremony, of discussion,
differ from battles only as the bloodless surrender of an outnumbered
force in the field differs from Waterloo or Trafalgar. I make a present
of all these admissions to the Fenian who collects money from
thoughtless Irishmen in America to blow up Dublin Castle; to the
detective who persuades foolish young workmen to order bombs from the
nearest ironmonger and then delivers them up to penal servitude; to our
military and naval commanders who believe, not in preaching, but in an
ultimatum backed by plenty of lyddite; and, generally, to all whom it
may concern. But of what use is it to substitute the way of the
reckless and bloodyminded for the way of the cautious and humane? Is
England any the better for the wreck of Clerkenwell prison, or Ireland
for the disestablishment of the Irish Church? Is there the smallest
reason to suppose that the nation which sheepishly let Charles and Laud
and Strafford coerce it, gained anything because it afterwards, still
more sheepishly, let a few strongminded Puritans, inflamed by the
masterpieces of Jewish revolutionary literature, cut off the heads of
the three? Suppose the Gunpowder plot had succeeded, and set a Fawkes
dynasty permanently on the throne, would it have made any difference to
the present state of the nation? The guillotine was used in France up
to the limit of human endurance, both on Girondins and Jacobins.
Fouquier Tinville followed Marie Antoinette to the scaffold; and Marie
Antoinette might have asked the crowd, just as pointedly as Fouquier
did, whether their bread would be any cheaper when her head was off.
And what came of it all? The Imperial France of the Rougon Macquart
family, and the Republican France of the Panama scandal and the Dreyfus
case. Was the difference worth the guillotining of all those unlucky
ladies and gentlemen, useless and mischievous as many of them were?
Would any sane man guillotine a mouse to bring about such a result?
Turn to Republican America. America has no Star Chamber, and no feudal
barons. But it has Trusts; and it has millionaires whose factories,
fenced in by live electric wires and defended by Pinkerton retainers
with magazine rifles, would have made a Radical of Reginald Front de
Boeuf. Would Washington or Franklin have lifted a finger in the cause
of American Independence if they had foreseen its reality?
No: what Cæsar, Cromwell, Napoleon could not do with all the physical
force and moral prestige of the State in their hands, cannot be done by
enthusiastic criminals and lunatics. Even the Jews, who, from Moses to
Marx and Lassalle, have inspired all the revolutions, have had to
confess that, after all, the dog will return to his vomit and the sow
that was washed to her wallowing in the mire; and we may as well make up
our minds that Man will return to his idols and his cupidities, in spite
of "movements" and all revolutions, until his nature is changed. Until
then, his early successes in building commercial civilizations (and such
civilizations, Good Heavens!) are but preliminaries to the inevitable
later stage, now threatening us, in which the passions which built the
civilization become fatal instead of productive, just as the same
qualities which make the lion king in the forest ensure his destruction
when he enters a city. Nothing can save society then except the clear
head and the wide purpose: war and competition, potent instruments of
selection and evolution in one epoch, become ruinous instruments of
degeneration in the next. In the breeding of animals and plants,
varieties which have arisen by selection through many generations
relapse precipitously into the wild type in a generation or two when
selection ceases; and in the same way a civilization in which lusty
pugnacity and greed have ceased to act as selective agents and have
begun to obstruct and destroy, rushes downwards and backwards with a
suddenness that enables an observer to see with consternation the upward
steps of many centuries retraced in a single lifetime. This has often
occurred even within the period covered by history; and in every
instance the turning point has been reached long before the attainment,
or even the general advocacy on paper, of the levelling-up of the mass
to the highest point attainable by the best nourished and cultivated
normal individuals.
We must therefore frankly give up the notion that Man as he exists is
capable of net progress. There will always be an illusion of progress,
because wherever we are conscious of an evil we remedy it, and therefore
always seem to ourselves to be progressing, forgetting that most of the
evils we see are the effects, finally become acute, of long-unnoticed
retrogressions; that our compromising remedies seldom fully recover the
lost ground; above all, that on the lines along which we are
degenerating, good has become evil in our eyes, and is being undone in
the name of progress precisely as evil is undone and replaced by good on
the lines along which we are evolving. This is indeed the Illusion of
Illusions; for it gives us infallible and appalling assurance that if
our political ruin is to come, it will be effected by ardent reformers
and supported by enthusiastic patriots as a series of necessary steps in
our progress. Let the Reformer, the Progressive, the Meliorist then
reconsider himself and his eternal ifs and ans which never become pots
and pans. Whilst Man remains what he is, there can be no progress
beyond the point already attained and fallen headlong from at every
attempt at civilization; and since even that point is but a pinnacle to
which a few people cling in giddy terror above an abyss of squalor, mere
progress should no longer charm us.
VIII
THE CONCEIT OF CIVILIZATION