There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endless
and useless arguments of philosophers; I mean the joke about which came
first, the chicken or the egg? I am not sure that properly understood,
it is so futile an inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to enter
on those deep metaphysical and theological differences of which the
chicken and egg debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type. The
evolutionary materialists are appropriately enough represented in the
vision of all things coming from an egg, a dim and monstrous oval germ
that had laid itself by accident. That other supernatural school of
thought (to which I personally adhere) would be not unworthily typified
in the fancy that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon by
a sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets. But it is
to much humbler functions that I here call the awful power of such a
distinction. Whether or no the living bird is at the beginning of our
mental chain, it is absolutely necessary that it should be at the end of
our mental chain. The bird is the thing to be aimed at--not with a gun,
but a life-bestowing wand. What is essential to our right thinking is
this: that the egg and the bird must not be thought of as equal cosmic
occurrences recurring alternatively forever. They must not become a mere
egg and bird pattern, like the egg and dart pattern. One is a means
and the other an end; they are in different mental worlds. Leaving
the complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in an
elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the
chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also
exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a
French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable
in himself. Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness;
forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious life
is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of
nothing but useful men and working institutions; that is, we only think
of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs. Instead of seeking to
breed our ideal bird, the eagle of Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or whatever
we happen to want, we talk entirely in terms of the process and the
embryo. The process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes
doubtful and even morbid; poison enters the embryo of everything; and
our politics are rotten eggs.
Idealism is only considering everything in its practical essence.
Idealism only means that we should consider a poker in reference to
poking before we discuss its suitability for wife-beating; that we
should ask if an egg is good enough for practical poultry-rearing before
we decide that the egg is bad enough for practical politics. But I know
that this primary pursuit of the theory (which is but pursuit of the
aim) exposes one to the cheap charge of fiddling while Rome is burning.
A school, of which Lord Rosebery is representative, has endeavored to
substitute for the moral or social ideals which have hitherto been the
motive of politics a general coherency or completeness in the social
system which has gained the nick-name of “efficiency.” I am not very
certain of the secret doctrine of this sect in the matter. But, as
far as I can make out, “efficiency” means that we ought to discover
everything about a machine except what it is for. There has arisen in
our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong
we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things
go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a
theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice,
to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must
have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at
all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right
to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.
It is then necessary to drop one’s daily agnosticism and attempt rerum
cognoscere causas. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy
man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely
that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to
be dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more
complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be
the theorist who is needed to deal with it; and in some extreme cases,
no one but the man (probably insane) who invented your flying-ship could
possibly say what was the matter with it.
“Efficiency,” of course, is futile for the same reason that strong men,
will-power and the superman are futile. That is, it is futile because
it only deals with actions after they have been performed. It has no
philosophy for incidents before they happen; therefore it has no power
of choice. An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it is
over; if it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right or wrong.
There is no such thing as backing a winner; for he cannot be a winner
when he is backed. There is no such thing as fighting on the winning
side; one fights to find out which is the winning side. If any operation
has occurred, that operation was efficient. If a man is murdered, the
murder was efficient. A tropical sun is as efficient in making people
lazy as a Lancashire foreman bully in making them energetic. Maeterlinck
is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors as
Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell are in filling a man with jam. But it
all depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery, being
a modern skeptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I, being an
orthodox Christian, prefer the jam. But both are efficient when they
have been effected; and inefficient until they are effected. A man who
thinks much about success must be the drowsiest sentimentalist; for he
must be always looking back. If he only likes victory he must always
come late for the battle. For the man of action there is nothing but
idealism.
This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in our
existing English trouble than any immediate plans or proposals. For the
present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were
originally aiming at. No man demands what he desires; each man demands
what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man really
wanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he
forgets it himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests,
a pandemonium of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliability does not merely
prevent any heroic consistency, it also prevents any really practical
compromise. One can only find the middle distance between two points if
the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement between two
litigants who cannot both get what they want; but not if they will
not even tell us what they want. The keeper of a restaurant would much
prefer that each customer should give his order smartly, though it
were for stewed ibis or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer
should sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical
calculations about how much food there can be on the premises. Most of
us have suffered from a certain sort of ladies who, by their perverse
unselfishness, give more trouble than the selfish; who almost clamor
for the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst seat. Most of us
have known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss of
self-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of such admirable
women, our practical politicians keep things in the same confusion
through the same doubt about their real demands. There is nothing that
so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are
bewildered on every side by politicians who are in favor of secular
education, but think it hopeless to work for it; who desire total
prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who regret
compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want peasant
proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed
and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. If our
statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done. If we ask
for something in the abstract we might get something in the concrete.
As it is, it is not only impossible to get what one wants, but it is
impossible to get any part of it, because nobody can mark it out plainly
like a map. That clear and even hard quality that there was in the old
bargaining has wholly vanished. We forget that the word “compromise”
contains, among other things, the rigid and ringing word “promise.”
Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as perfection. The middle
point is as fixed as the extreme point.
If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer,
as a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable
distance. It is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate
and I differ. There is an exquisite mathematical split second at which
the plank tips up. My common-sense ends just before that instant; the
pirate’s common-sense begins just beyond it. But the point itself is as
hard as any geometrical diagram; as abstract as any theological dogma.
*****