The common conception among the dregs of Darwinian culture is that
men have slowly worked their way out of inequality into a state
of comparative equality. The truth is, I fancy, almost exactly the
opposite. All men have normally and naturally begun with the idea of
equality; they have only abandoned it late and reluctantly, and always
for some material reason of detail. They have never naturally felt that
one class of men was superior to another; they have always been driven
to assume it through certain practical limitations of space and time.
For example, there is one element which must always tend to
oligarchy--or rather to despotism; I mean the element of hurry. If the
house has caught fire a man must ring up the fire engines; a committee
cannot ring them up. If a camp is surprised by night somebody must give
the order to fire; there is no time to vote it. It is solely a question
of the physical limitations of time and space; not at all of any mental
limitations in the mass of men commanded. If all the people in the house
were men of destiny it would still be better that they should not
all talk into the telephone at once; nay, it would be better that the
silliest man of all should speak uninterrupted. If an army actually
consisted of nothing but Hanibals and Napoleons, it would still be
better in the case of a surprise that they should not all give orders
together. Nay, it would be better if the stupidest of them all gave the
orders. Thus, we see that merely military subordination, so far from
resting on the inequality of men, actually rests on the equality of men.
Discipline does not involve the Carlylean notion that somebody is always
right when everybody is wrong, and that we must discover and crown that
somebody. On the contrary, discipline means that in certain frightfully
rapid circumstances, one can trust anybody so long as he is not
everybody. The military spirit does not mean (as Carlyle fancied)
obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the contrary, the military
spirit means, if anything, obeying the weakest and stupidest man,
obeying him merely because he is a man, and not a thousand men.
Submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is
only servility.
Now it can be easily shown that the thing we call aristocracy in Europe
is not in its origin and spirit an aristocracy at all. It is not a
system of spiritual degrees and distinctions like, for example, the
caste system of India, or even like the old Greek distinction
between free men and slaves. It is simply the remains of a military
organization, framed partly to sustain the sinking Roman Empire, partly
to break and avenge the awful onslaught of Islam. The word Duke simply
means Colonel, just as the word Emperor simply means Commander-in-Chief.
The whole story is told in the single title of Counts of the Holy Roman
Empire, which merely means officers in the European army against
the contemporary Yellow Peril. Now in an army nobody ever dreams of
supposing that difference of rank represents a difference of moral
reality. Nobody ever says about a regiment, “Your Major is very humorous
and energetic; your Colonel, of course, must be even more humorous
and yet more energetic.” No one ever says, in reporting a mess-room
conversation, “Lieutenant Jones was very witty, but was naturally
inferior to Captain Smith.” The essence of an army is the idea of
official inequality, founded on unofficial equality. The Colonel is not
obeyed because he is the best man, but because he is the Colonel. Such
was probably the spirit of the system of dukes and counts when it first
arose out of the military spirit and military necessities of Rome. With
the decline of those necessities it has gradually ceased to have
meaning as a military organization, and become honeycombed with unclean
plutocracy. Even now it is not a spiritual aristocracy--it is not so bad
as all that. It is simply an army without an enemy--billeted upon the
people.
Man, therefore, has a specialist as well as comrade-like aspect; and the
case of militarism is not the only case of such specialist submission.
The tinker and tailor, as well as the soldier and sailor, require a
certain rigidity of rapidity of action: at least, if the tinker is not
organized that is largely why he does not tink on any large scale. The
tinker and tailor often represent the two nomadic races in Europe: the
Gipsy and the Jew; but the Jew alone has influence because he alone
accepts some sort of discipline. Man, we say, has two sides, the
specialist side where he must have subordination, and the social side
where he must have equality. There is a truth in the saying that ten
tailors go to make a man; but we must remember also that ten Poets
Laureate or ten Astronomers Royal go to make a man, too. Ten million
tradesmen go to make Man himself; but humanity consists of tradesmen
when they are not talking shop. Now the peculiar peril of our time,
which I call for argument’s sake Imperialism or Caesarism, is the
complete eclipse of comradeship and equality by specialism and
domination.
There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable--personal
government and impersonal government. If my anarchic friends will not
have rules--they will have rulers. Preferring personal government, with
its tact and flexibility, is called Royalism. Preferring impersonal
government, with its dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism.
Objecting broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh; at
least, I know no more philosophic word for it. You can be guided by
the shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler, or by the equality and
ascertained justice of one rule; but you must have one or the other,
or you are not a nation, but a nasty mess. Now men in their aspect of
equality and debate adore the idea of rules; they develop and complicate
them greatly to excess. A man finds far more regulations and definitions
in his club, where there are rules, than in his home, where there is
a ruler. A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance,
carries this mummery to the point of a methodical madness. The whole
system is stiff with rigid unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis
Carroll. You would think the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly
silent. You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put it
on to go away; therefore he takes off his hat to walk out and puts it on
to stop in. Names are forbidden, and a man must call his own father
“my right honorable friend the member for West Birmingham.” These are,
perhaps, fantasies of decay: but fundamentally they answer a masculine
appetite. Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are universal; men
feel that law is equal, even when it is not equitable. There is a wild
fairness in the thing--as there is in tossing up.
Again, it is gravely unfortunate that when critics do attack such cases
as the Commons it is always on the points (perhaps the few points) where
the Commons are right. They denounce the House as the Talking-Shop,
and complain that it wastes time in wordy mazes. Now this is just one
respect in which the Commons are actually like the Common People. If
they love leisure and long debate, it is because all men love it; that
they really represent England. There the Parliament does approach to the
virile virtues of the pothouse.
The real truth is that adumbrated in the introductory section when we
spoke of the sense of home and property, as now we speak of the sense
of counsel and community. All men do naturally love the idea of leisure,
laughter, loud and equal argument; but there stands a specter in our
hall. We are conscious of the towering modern challenge that is called
specialism or cut-throat competition--Business. Business will
have nothing to do with leisure; business will have no truck with
comradeship; business will pretend to no patience with all the legal
fictions and fantastic handicaps by which comradeship protects its
egalitarian ideal. The modern millionaire, when engaged in the agreeable
and typical task of sacking his own father, will certainly not refer
to him as the right honorable clerk from the Laburnum Road, Brixton.
Therefore there has arisen in modern life a literary fashion devoting
itself to the romance of business, to great demigods of greed and to
fairyland of finance. This popular philosophy is utterly despotic and
anti-democratic; this fashion is the flower of that Caesarism against
which I am concerned to protest. The ideal millionaire is strong in the
possession of a brain of steel. The fact that the real millionaire is
rather more often strong in the possession of a head of wood, does not
alter the spirit and trend of the idolatry. The essential argument is
“Specialists must be despots; men must be specialists. You cannot have
equality in a soap factory; so you cannot have it anywhere. You cannot
have comradeship in a wheat corner; so you cannot have it at all. We
must have commercial civilization; therefore we must destroy democracy.”
I know that plutocrats have seldom sufficient fancy to soar to such
examples as soap or wheat. They generally confine themselves, with fine
freshness of mind, to a comparison between the state and a ship. One
anti-democratic writer remarked that he would not like to sail in a
vessel in which the cabin-boy had an equal vote with the captain. It
might easily be urged in answer that many a ship (the Victoria, for
instance) was sunk because an admiral gave an order which a cabin-boy
could see was wrong. But this is a debating reply; the essential fallacy
is both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact is that we were all
born in a state; we were not all born on a ship; like some of our great
British bankers. A ship still remains a specialist experiment, like
a diving-bell or a flying ship: in such peculiar perils the need for
promptitude constitutes the need for autocracy. But we live and die in
the vessel of the state; and if we cannot find freedom camaraderie and
the popular element in the state, we cannot find it at all. And the
modern doctrine of commercial despotism means that we shall not find it
at all. Our specialist trades in their highly civilized state cannot (it
says) be run without the whole brutal business of bossing and sacking,
“too old at forty” and all the rest of the filth. And they must be run,
and therefore we call on Caesar. Nobody but the Superman could descend
to do such dirty work.
Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is wrong. This is the huge
modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead
of altering human conditions to fit the human soul. If soap boiling
is really inconsistent with brotherhood, so much the worst for
soap-boiling, not for brotherhood. If civilization really cannot get on
with democracy, so much the worse for civilization, not for democracy.
Certainly, it would be far better to go back to village communes, if
they really are communes. Certainly, it would be better to do without
soap rather than to do without society. Certainly, we would sacrifice
all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical science and
frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come
to us with comrades in a common tavern. I do not say the sacrifice will
be necessary; I only say it will be easy.