of exceptional good luck, and to show the surplus forces of humanity as
on the whole antagonistic to any such equilibrium with the Normal Social
Life. To open the book of history haphazard is, most commonly, to open
it at a page where the surplus forces appear to be in more or less
destructive conflict with the Normal Social Life. One opens at the
depopulation of Italy by the aggressive great estates of the Roman
Empire, at the impoverishment of the French peasantry by a too
centralised monarchy before the revolution, or at the huge degenerative
growth of the great industrial towns of western Europe in the nineteenth
century. Or again one opens at destructive wars. One sees these surplus
forces over and above the Normal Social Life working towards unstable
concentrations of population, to centralisation of government, to
migrations and conflicts upon a large scale; one discovers the process
developing into a phase of social fragmentation and destruction, and
then, unless the whole country has been wasted down to its very soil,
the Normal Social Life returns as the heath and furze and grass return
after the burning of a common. But it never returns in precisely its old
form. The surplus forces have always produced some traceable change; the
rhythm is a little altered. As between the Gallic peasant before the
Roman conquest, the peasant of the Gallic province, the Carlovingian
peasant, the French peasant of the thirteenth, the seventeenth, and the
twentieth centuries, there is, in spite of a general uniformity of life,
of a common atmosphere of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy,
and domestic intimacy, an effect of accumulating generalising influences
and of wider relevancies. And the oscillations of empires and kingdoms,
religious movements, wars, invasions, settlements leave upon the mind an
impression that the surplus life of mankind, the less-localised life of
mankind, that life of mankind which is not directly connected with the
soil but which has become more or less detached from and independent of
it, is becoming proportionately more important in relation to the Normal
Social Life. It is as if a different way of living was emerging from the
Normal Social Life and freeing itself from its traditions and
limitations.
And this is more particularly the effect upon the mind of a review of
the history of the past two hundred years. The little speculative
activities of the alchemist and natural philosopher, the little economic
experiments of the acquisitive and enterprising landed proprietor,
favoured by unprecedented periods of security and freedom, have passed
into a new phase of extraordinary productivity. They had added
preposterously and continue to add on a gigantic scale and without any
evident limits to the continuation of their additions, to the resources
of humanity. To the strength of horses and men and slaves has been added
the power of machines and the possibility of economies that were once
incredible. The Normal Social Life has been overshadowed as it has never
been overshadowed before by the concentrations and achievements of the
surplus life. Vast new possibilities open to the race; the traditional
life of mankind, its traditional systems of association, are challenged
and threatened; and all the social thought, all the political activity
of our time turns in reality upon the conflict of this ancient system
whose essentials we have here defined and termed the Normal Social Life
with the still vague and formless impulses that seem destined either to
involve it and the race in a final destruction or to replace it by some
new and probably more elaborate method of human association.
Because there is the following difference between the action of the
surplus forces as we see them to-day and as they appeared before the
outbreak of physical science and mechanism. Then it seemed clearly
necessary that whatever social and political organisation developed, it
must needs rest ultimately on the tiller of the soil, the agricultural
holding, and the Normal Social Life. But now even in agriculture huge
wholesale methods have appeared. They are declared to be destructive;
but it is quite conceivable that they may be made ultimately as
recuperative as that small agriculture which has hitherto been the
inevitable social basis. If that is so, then the new ways of living may
not simply impose themselves in a growing proportion upon the Normal
Social Life, but they may even oust it and replace it altogether. Or
they may oust it and fail to replace it. In the newer countries the
Normal Social Life does not appear to establish itself at all rapidly.
No real peasantry appears in either America or Australia; and in the
older countries, unless there is the most elaborate legislative and
fiscal protection, the peasant population wanes before the large farm,
the estate, and overseas production.
Now most of the political and social discussion of the last hundred
years may be regarded and rephrased as an attempt to apprehend this
defensive struggle of the Normal Social Life against waxing novelty and
innovation, and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who
participate. And it is very largely a matter of temperament and free
choice still, just where we shall decide to place ourselves. Let us
consider some of the key words of contemporary thought, such as
Liberalism, Individualism, Socialism, in the light of this broad
generalisation we have made; and then we shall find it easier to explain
our intention in employing as a second technicality the phrase of The
Great State as an opposite to the Normal Social Life, which we have
already defined.
§ 2
The Normal Social Life has been defined as one based on agriculture,
traditional and essentially unchanging. It has needed no toleration and
displayed no toleration for novelty and strangeness. Its beliefs have
been of such a nature as to justify and sustain itself, and it has had
an intrinsic hostility to any other beliefs. The God of its community
has been a jealous god even when he was only a tribal and local god.
Only very occasionally in history until the coming of the modern period
do we find any human community relaxing from this ancient and more
normal state of entire intolerance towards ideas or practices other than
its own. When toleration and a receptive attitude towards alien ideas
was manifested in the Old World, it was at some trading centre or
political centre; new ideas and new religions came by water along the
trade routes. And such toleration as there was rarely extended to active
teaching and propaganda. Even in liberal Athens the hemlock was in the
last resort at the service of the ancient gods and the ancient morals
against the sceptical critic.
But with the steady development of innovating forces in human affairs
there has actually grown up a cult of receptivity, a readiness for new
ideas, a faith in the probable truth of novelties. Liberalism—I do not,
of course, refer in any way to the political party which makes this
profession—is essentially antitraditionalism; its tendency is to commit
for trial any institution or belief that is brought before it. It is the
accuser and antagonist of all the fixed and ancient values and
imperatives and prohibitions of the Normal Social Life. And growing up
in relation to Liberalism and sustained by it is the great body of
scientific knowledge, which professes at least to be absolutely
undogmatic and perpetually on its trial and under assay and
re-examination.
Now a very large part of the advanced thought of the past century is no
more than the confused negation of the broad beliefs and institutions
which have been the heritage and social basis of humanity for immemorial
years. This is as true of the extremest Individualism as of the
extremest Socialism. The former denies that element of legal and
customary control which has always subdued the individual to the needs
of the Normal Social Life, and the latter that qualified independence of
distributed property which is the basis of family autonomy. Both are
movements against the ancient life, and nothing is more absurd than the
misrepresentation which presents either as a conservative force. They
are two divergent schools with a common disposition to reject the old
and turn towards the new. The Individualist professes a faith for which
he has no rational evidence, that the mere abandonment of traditions and
controls must ultimately produce a new and beautiful social order; while
the Socialist, with an equal liberalism, regards the outlook with a kind
of hopeful dread, and insists upon an elaborate readjustment, a new and
untried scheme of social organisation to replace the shattered and
weakening Normal Social Life.
Both these movements, and, indeed, all movements that are not movements
for the subjugation of innovation and the restoration of tradition, are
vague in the prospect they contemplate. They produce no definite
forecasts of the quality of the future towards which they so confidently
indicate the way. But this is less true of modern socialism than of its
antithesis, and it becomes less and less true as socialism, under an
enormous torrent of criticism, slowly washes itself clean from the mass
of partial statement, hasty misstatement, sheer error and presumption
that obscured its first emergence.
But it is well to be very clear upon one point at this stage, and that
is, that this present time is not a battle-ground between individualism
and socialism; it is a battle-ground between the Normal Social Life on
the one hand and a complex of forces on the other which seek a form of
replacement and seem partially to find it in these and other doctrines.
Nearly all contemporary thinkers who are not too muddled to be
assignable fall into one of three classes, of which the third we shall
distinguish is the largest and most various and divergent. It will be
convenient to say a little of each of these classes before proceeding to
a more particular account of the third. Our analysis will cut across
many accepted classifications, but there will be ample justification for
this rearrangement. All of them may be dealt with quite justly as
accepting the general account of the historical process which is here
given.
Then first we must distinguish a series of writers and thinkers which
one may call—the word conservative being already politically
assigned—the Conservators.
These are people who really do consider the Normal Social Life as the
only proper and desirable life for the great mass of humanity, and they
are fully prepared to subordinate all exceptional and surplus lives to
the moral standards and limitations that arise naturally out of the
Normal Social Life. They desire a state in which property is widely
distributed, a community of independent families protected by law and an
intelligent democratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of large
accumulations and linked by a common religion. Their attitude to the
forces of change is necessarily a hostile attitude. They are disposed to
regard innovations in transit and machinery as undesirable, and even
mischievous disturbances of a wholesome equilibrium. They are at least
unfriendly to any organisation of scientific research, and scornful of
the pretensions of science. Criticisms of the methods of logic,
scepticism of the more widely diffused human beliefs, they would
classify as insanity. Two able English writers, Mr. G. K. Chesterton and
Mr. Belloc, have given the clearest expression to this system of ideals,
and stated an admirable case for it. They present a conception of
vinous, loudly singing, earthy, toiling, custom-ruled, wholesome, and
insanitary men; they are pagan in the sense that their hearts are with
the villagers and not with the townsmen, Christian in the spirit of the
parish priest. There are no other Conservators so clear-headed and
consistent. But their teaching is merely the logical expression of an
enormous amount of conservative feeling. Vast multitudes of less lucid
minds share their hostility to novelty and research; hate, dread, and
are eager to despise science, and glow responsive to the warm, familiar
expressions of primordial feelings and immemorial prejudices. The rural
conservative, the liberal of the allotments and small-holdings type, Mr.
Roosevelt—in his Western-farmer, philoprogenitive phase as distinguished
from the phase of his more imperialist moments—all present themselves as
essentially Conservators, as seekers after and preservers of the Normal
Social Life.
So, too, do Socialists of the William Morris type. The mind of William
Morris was profoundly reactionary. He hated the whole trend of later
nineteenth-century modernism with the hatred natural to a man of
considerable scholarship and intense æsthetic sensibilities. His mind
turned, exactly as Mr. Belloc’s turns, to the finished and enriched
Normal Social Life of western Europe in the middle ages, but, unlike Mr.
Belloc, he believed that, given private ownership of land and the
ordinary materials of life, there must necessarily be an aggregatory
process, usury, expropriation, the development of an exploiting wealthy
class. He believed profit was the devil. His _News from Nowhere_
pictures a communism that amounted in fact to little more than a system
of private ownership of farms and trades without money or any buying and
selling, in an atmosphere of geniality, generosity, and mutual
helpfulness. Mr. Belloc, with a harder grip upon the realities of life,
would have the widest distribution of proprietorship, with an alert
democratic government continually legislating against the protean
reappearances of usury and accumulation, and attacking, breaking up, and
redistributing any large unanticipated bodies of wealth that appeared.
But both men are equally set towards the Normal Social Life, and equally
enemies of the New. The so-called “socialist” land legislation of New
Zealand again is a tentative towards the realisation of the same school
of ideas: great estates are to be automatically broken up, property is
to be kept disseminated; a vast amount of political speaking and writing
in America and throughout the world enforces one’s impression of the
widespread influence of Conservator ideals.
Of course, it is inevitable that phases of prosperity for the Normal
Social Life will lead to phases of overpopulation and scarcity, there
will be occasional famines and occasional pestilences and plethoras of
vitality leading to the blood-letting of war. I suppose Mr. Chesterton
and Mr. Belloc at least have the courage of their opinions, and are
prepared to say that such things always have been and always must be;
they are part of the jolly rhythms of the human lot under the sun, and
are to be taken with the harvest home and love-making and the peaceful
ending of honoured lives as an integral part of the unending drama of
mankind.
§ 3
Now opposed to the Conservators are all those who do not regard
contemporary humanity as a final thing nor the Normal Social Life as the
inevitable basis of human continuity. They believe in secular change, in
Progress, in a future for our species differing continually more from
its past. On the whole, they are prepared for the gradual
disentanglement of men from the Normal Social Life altogether, and they
look for new ways of living and new methods of human association with a
certain adventurous hopefulness.
Now, this second large class does not so much admit of subdivision into
two as present a great variety of intermediaries between two extremes. I
propose to give distinctive names to these extremes, with the very clear
proviso that they are not antagonised, and that the great multitude of
this second, anti-conservator class, this liberal, more novel class
modern conditions have produced, falls between them, and is neither the
one nor the other, but partaking in various degrees of both. On the one
hand, then, we have that type of mind which is irritated by and
distrustful of all collective proceedings, which is profoundly
distrustful of churches and states, which is expressed essentially by
Individualism. The Individualist appears to regard the extensive
disintegrations of the Normal Social Life that are going on to-day with
an extreme hopefulness. Whatever is ugly or harsh in modern
industrialism or in the novel social development of our time he seems to
consider as a necessary aspect of a process of selection and survival,
whose tendencies are on the whole inevitably satisfactory. The future
welfare of man he believes in effect may be trusted to the spontaneous
and planless activities of people of good will, and nothing but state
intervention can effectively impede its attainment. And curiously close
to this extreme optimistic school in its moral quality and logical
consequences, though contrasting widely in the sinister gloom of its
spirit, is the socialism of Karl Marx. He declared the contemporary
world to be a great process of financial aggrandisement and general
expropriation, of increasing power for the few and of increasing
hardship and misery for the many, a process that would go on until at
last a crisis of unendurable tension would be reached and the social
revolution ensue. The world had, in fact, to be worse before it could
hope to be better. He contemplated a continually exacerbated Class War,
with a millennium of extraordinary vagueness beyond as the reward of the
victorious workers. His common quality with the Individualist lies in
his repudiation of and antagonism to plans and arrangements, in his
belief in the overriding power of Law. Their common influence is the
discouragement of collective understandings upon the basis of the
existing state. Both converge in practice upon _laissez faire_. I would
therefore lump them together under the term of Planless Progressives,
and I would contrast with them those types which believe supremely in
systematised purpose.
The purposeful and systematic types, in common with the Individualist
and Marxist, regard the Normal Social Life, for all the many thousands
of years behind it, as a phase, and as a phase which is now passing, in
human experience; and they are prepared for a future society that may be
ultimately different right down to its essential relationships from the
human past. But they also believe that the forces that have been
assailing and disintegrating the Normal Social Life, which have been, on
the one hand, producing great accumulations of wealth, private freedom,
and ill-defined, irresponsible and socially dangerous power, and, on the
other, labour hordes, for the most part urban, without any property or
outlook except continuous toil and anxiety, which in England have
substituted a dischargeable agricultural labourer for the independent
peasant almost completely, and in America seem to be arresting any
general development of the Normal Social Life at all, are forces of wide
and indefinite possibility that need to be controlled by a collective
effort implying a collective design, deflected from merely injurious
consequences and organised for a new human welfare upon new lines. They
agree with that class of thinking I have distinguished as the
Conservators in their recognition of vast contemporary disorders and
their denial of the essential beneficence of change. But while the
former seem to regard all novelty and innovation as a mere inundation to
be met, banked back, defeated and survived, these more hopeful and
adventurous minds would rather regard contemporary change as amounting
on the whole to the tumultuous and almost catastrophic opening-up of
possible new channels, the violent opportunity of vast, deep, new ways
to great unprecedented human ends, ends that are neither feared nor
evaded.
Now while the Conservators are continually talking of the “eternal
facts” of human life and human nature and falling back upon a conception
of permanence that is continually less true as our perspectives extend,
these others are full of the conception of adaptation, of deliberate
change in relationship and institution to meet changing needs. I would
suggest for them, therefore, as opposed to the Conservators and
contrasted with the Planless Progressives, the name of Constructors.
They are the extreme right, as it were, while the Planless Progressives
are the extreme left of Anti-Conservator thought.
I believe that these distinctions I have made cover practically every
clear form of contemporary thinking, and are a better and more helpful
classification than any now current. But, of course, nearly every
individual nowadays is at least a little confused, and will be found to
wobble in the course even of a brief discussion between one attitude and
the other. This is a separation of opinions rather than of persons. And
particularly that word Socialism has become so vague and incoherent that
for a man to call himself a socialist nowadays is to give no indication
whatever whether he is a Conservator like William Morris, a
non-Constructor like Karl Marx, or a Constructor of any of half a dozen
different schools. On the whole, however, modern socialism tends to fall
towards the Constructor wing. So, too, do those various movements in
England and Germany and France called variously nationalist and
imperialist, and so do the American civic and social reformers. Under
the same heading must come such attempts to give the vague impulses of
Syndicalism a concrete definition as the “Guild Socialism” of M. Orage.
All these movements are agreed that the world is progressive towards a
novel and unprecedented social order, not necessarily and fatally
better, and that it needs organised and even institutional guidance
thither, however much they differ as to the form that order should
assume.
For the greater portion of a century socialism has been before the
world, and it is not perhaps premature to attempt a word or so of
analysis of that great movement in the new terms we are here employing.
The origins of the socialist idea were complex and multifarious, never
at any time has it succeeded in separating out a statement of itself
that was at once simple, complete, and acceptable to any large
proportion of those who call themselves socialists. But always it has
pointed to two or three definite things. The first of these is that
unlimited freedoms of private property, with increasing facilities of
exchange, combination, and aggrandisement, become more and more
dangerous to human liberty by the expropriation and reduction to private
wages slavery of larger and larger proportions of the population. Every
school of socialism states this in some more or less complete form,
however divergent the remedial methods suggested by the different
schools. And, next, every school of socialism accepts the concentration
of management and property as necessary, and declines to contemplate
what is the typical Conservator remedy, its refragmentation. Accordingly
it sets up not only against the large private owner, but against owners
generally, the idea of a public proprietor, the State, which shall hold
in the collective interest. But where the earlier socialisms stopped
short, and where to this day socialism is vague, divided, and
unprepared, is upon the psychological problems involved in that new and
largely unprecedented form of proprietorship, and upon the still more
subtle problems of its attainment. These are vast, and profoundly,
widely, and multitudinously difficult problems, and it was natural and
inevitable that the earlier socialists in the first enthusiasm of their
idea should minimise these difficulties, pretend in the fullness of
their faith that partial answers to objections were complete answers,
and display the common weaknesses of honest propaganda the whole world
over. Socialism is now old enough to know better. Few modern socialists
present their faith as a complete panacea, and most are now setting to
work in earnest upon these long-shirked preliminary problems of human
interaction through which the vital problem of a collective head and
brain can alone be approached.