INDEX 217
[p. vii] INTRODUCTORY LETTER FROM THE RIGHT
HON. LORD WILLOUGHBY DE BROKE
_12, Wilton Crescent,
London, S.W. 1.
May 1st, 1921._
Dear Mr. Ludovici,--
Thank you very much for letting me see the proofs of your book. It
seems to me to be written at a very opportune moment, and to suggest a
line of thought which could be followed with great advantage.
In these days of “propaganda,” when our fine old language is being
wrested every hour of the day in speeches, pamphlets and leaflets,
to illustrate the views of political parties, it is more than ever
important that we should have a clear understanding of the true meaning
of words.
Nor is the vague use of phrases confined to the pioneer of political
causes. Our very war memorials are utilised to inform us that the brave
fellows whose honour they commemorate died for “freedom.” If that were
true, they indeed died in vain. Nothing can be further from even the
most elementary conception of freedom than the present condition of
society in these islands. But the pious and devout people who wrote
those inscriptions are possibly not to blame.
Long before the war the nation had been so content to be governed by
phrases that [p. viii] we were actually asked to enlist for such phrases
as “The rights of small nations,” “Self-determination,” and the like,
whereas in very truth we were forced to fight to save our own skins.
Your suggestions open up so many considerations that I cannot explore
them all. But your proposition that the quality of our institutions
may, after all, be sounder than the quality of the men who have failed
to work them, seems especially worthy of notice. If your book serves
to direct attention to the wisdom of our ancestors, it will be a great
benefit to the public.
Yours very truly,
Willoughby de Broke.
[p. ix] PREFACE.
The Great War has left the world, and particularly poor old battered
Europe, with many a high ideal shattered and many a respected principle
destroyed. Not only the beliefs of our grandfathers, but also the
convictions of our fathers, seem now old-fashioned and no longer
seaworthy. Certainly an old era is dead; but has a new era been born?
A new era suggests new ideals, new leading principles; it suggests a
breastful of new and stout convictions. Have we of this dawning era any
new ideals or principles? Have we any new and stout convictions?
It seems as if we had been plunged into this new world unclothed. True
enough, millions have doffed their khaki; but the citizen clothing they
have donned in exchange--is it all make-believe, all eye-wash? Are we
really naked?
At all events, before we can possibly tell where we are, or how we
stand, the most necessary preliminary step would seem to be a general
stock-taking of our ideals, principles and convictions--a re-definition
of the big words that once led us, and of the great phrases with
which we were once inspired. Only then, only when this re-definition
shall have been accomplished, does it seem possible that we shall be
able to [p. x] clothe ourselves in the ideology of our new and brightly
illuminated age.
This book is a modest attempt at this spade work of re-definition. It
does not pretend to be either exhaustive or expert. It takes up just a
few of the old words and phrases, and by re-examining them in the new
light, hopes rather to point the way than to cover the whole distance
to the destination.
Alarming sounds fill the air. There are wars and rumours of wars
wherever you turn. Indeed, there are rumours abroad and at home of
the worst kind of war, the cruellest and most devastating kind of
war--civil war. Can it be possible that a good deal of this threat of
civil war arises from the very need which this book undertakes however
imperfectly to supply? Can it be possible that revolution and even
Bolshevism may arise out of this need for a re-definition of terms?
At all events, even if this need is only a small contributory cause,
it is serious enough and cannot be lightly passed over. It is for fear
lest this need may be something more serious than a small contributory
cause, that the author has suggested the remedy of re-definition
outlined both in precept and example in this book. If his pioneer
effort, however limited in range, may lead others to produce more
thorough examples of his method, he will consider that his pains have
been more than adequately repaid.
Anthony M. Ludovici.
_London, August, 1921._
[p. 11] THE FALSE ASSUMPTIONS OF “DEMOCRACY.”
INTRODUCTION.
THE CONFUSION OF LANGUAGE AND ITS RELATION TO REVOLUTION.
“Babble, babble; our old England may go down in babble at last.”
Tennyson (_Locksley Hall--Sixty Years After_).
Nothing on earth leads more certainly to disunion than a division of
tongues. When it became necessary to disperse the iniquitous builders
of the Tower of Babel, we know the expedient to which the Lord
resorted, and how effective it proved to be. But whereas unity is a
desirable condition, and a common tongue is one of the most potent
means of realising it, people not infrequently forget that a common
tongue presupposes a common uniform culture. It depends upon a common
view of human life and the world. This common culture provides the
frame, so to speak, to the design of life, in which every word of a
language fits like a piece of mosaic. Remove the frame, disturb the
arrangement, and the odd pieces of mosaic fall all about you and lose
their significance and their necessary association. They can be used
only as--missiles. [p12]
Whatever weight the usual arguments against the Middle Ages may
possess, at least this is plain, that in mediæval times a common
culture prevailed among the leading nations of Europe. Indeed, if we
wished to sum up the effect of the Middle Ages in one sentence, we
could not express ourselves more clearly than by saying, that in those
days the leaders of men attempted to convert Europe into a single
nation. This effort, though only partially successful, at least led to
the magnificent result that most men, of what nation soever, understood
one another--understood one another particularly in their use of
abstract or general terms. For that is the test. In the end the names
of things remain. The words representing common objects are usually as
permanent as those objects themselves. Fashion may destroy the object
and thus render the word obsolete; but for hundreds of years none will
dispute the proper connotation of the word “chair,” “table,” “basket,”
for instance; while in the realm of abstract and general terms such
severe fluctuations may have taken place as to make the same word mean
something different to each generation.
Now the supreme importance of abstract or general terms lies in the
fact that they are the words with which we guide our lives, mark out
our goals and direct our effort. It is therefore urgently necessary
that they should stand for very precise ideas, and that as the current
coinage of speech they should mean the same things to all men of the
same group, body, or nation. [p13]
As opposed to the effort of the Middle Ages, however, the effort of
this Age, or the Muddle Age, seems to be directed towards turning
every nation into a Europe--into a unit, that is to say, without
unity. And this lack of unity is nowhere more acute and more apparent
than in the realm of abstract or general terms. People of the same
nation, nowadays, no longer speak the same language. They no longer
mean the same things, or convey the same ideas, when they speak of
Happiness, Beauty, Order, Right, Freedom, Liberty, Justice, etc. The
frame has gone. The common culture has been replaced by a congeries
of pseudo-cultures, all in active conflict. The consequence is that
the all-important words of this class have fallen out of place in the
design of life; they have no unifying whole in which they can find a
stable position, they are at a loose end, so to speak, and they can be
used not as intelligent missives, but only as missiles between isolated
groups and parties that are doomed to eternal conflict.
A word at a loose end, however, is a word devoid of definite
associations and therefore of meaning. Can a word devoid of meaning be
used as a missile? Certainly it can, provided that it be given, despite
its loss of an intellectual appeal, sufficient motive power to provoke
an emotion. But of this anon.
There can be no doubt that we have reached a condition in modern
Europe, in which each nation is, as it were, a complex of nations--a
complex in which the majority of the most important words (the
abstract [p14] and general terms) not only mean different things to
different groups and coteries, but also convey no precise meaning
whatsoever to anybody. This, however, constitutes a state of complete
confusion, and therefore a very grave danger. Just as one cannot help
appearing stupid when one is trying and failing to understand a foreign
tongue, one really is stupid when one cannot understand one’s own
tongue.
If stupidity seems to be increasing--and there surely cannot be
much doubt concerning at least this form of “Progress,”--it is due
chiefly to men’s growing incapacity to understand their mother tongue.
Abstract and general terms are no longer comprehensible even to the
most literate; to the illiterate they are simply fireworks, flags or
flagstones.
Now this would be all very well if it ended in stupidity. But that is
not the final bourne of the present confusion of language. The final
bourne is something much more serious, much more disastrous. It is
revolution.
All those who may be tempted to regard this conclusion as extreme,
would do well to pause a moment here, in order to dwell upon the
possible consequences of a confusion of language.
Is it not clear that at all times and in all climes where a confusion
of language has existed, man has been doomed not only to be misleading
and misled, but also to be incapable of leading? That is the worst
danger. A lack of precision amounting almost to incomprehensibility is
sure in any case to mislead; but what if it makes it no longer possible
to lead? [p15]
There will always be thousands of men prepared to mislead their
fellows. Even in the heydey of every culture this has been so. Even
with language at its brightest and best in precision and adequacy
this is always so. But how about those who are prepared to lead their
fellows, and who are admirably equipped for so doing? What are they to
do if the only medium which lies to hand is so corrupt, so devoid of
meaning, that they cannot use it without the tragic certainty of being
misunderstood?
And yet who would undertake to stand up and speak to-day, even before
an educated audience, without feeling certain beforehand that he
would be misunderstood if he used the words Liberty, Freedom, Right,
Democracy, Patriotism, etc.?
That is the danger. While there is a harvest prepared for those who
would mislead in days like the present; for the rare individual who
would lead, who is sufficiently gifted to lead, and whose leadership is
needed, there can be but disappointment and barrenness.
This is the pass to which our present confusion of language has brought
us. It makes revolution possible, because it makes the pursuit of false
ideals inevitable, and conflict and misunderstanding a certainty.
The causes of our present condition are to be sought, first and
chiefly, in the decline of a common and uniform culture, secondly in
the cheap literature that has come into being since the Education Act
of 1870, and thirdly in modern journalism.
In modern journalism the distortion and abuse of terms, the crippling
of words has [p16] become almost a habit. Catachresis, or the forcing
and straining of words, is the rule; nowhere is the sacred duty of
precision less observed than in the very quarter where its sway should
be most uncontested. The journalist, intent only on sensation, is the
first to debase words into missiles or empty symbols. He it is who
sets the example to the crowd, by picking up these unfortunate fallen
pieces of mosaic, in order to fling them about with the wantonness of
a schoolboy. He it is who shakes the shoddy frame of modern culture
in the hope of making even more of these sparkling fragments fall out
of the design of life, until ultimately when some one does arise who
would choose to construct rather than to destroy, he finds nothing to
hand but shapeless and irrecognisable monstrosities, chipped into mere
stones by the mad fury with which they have been hurled about.
Matters would not be so bad if it were possible to point to one class,
one stratum of society in England, in which language was treated with
more respect. Unfortunately this is no longer possible. Even among
speakers of good education this misuse of language is all too common.
The present writer once heard the Bishop of London address a cultivated
audience on the subject of Reconstruction, and was compelled to take
exception at least a dozen times to that dignitary’s illegitimate use
of the word “Democracy.”[1]
The reality of the danger, its imminence, will perhaps strike the most
incredulous when it is pointed out to them that the [p17] French
Revolution itself was the outcome of a confusion of language; nor can
there be any doubt that the Russian Revolution had a similar origin.
The French Revolution can be traced, and has been traced, even by
writers quite friendly to “democracy,” to the radical misunderstanding
of three words--Nature, Freedom, and Man--by Jean Jacques Rousseau.
This writer, as is well known, after having formed a totally fantastic
and false concept of Nature, began to speculate upon the unhappy
contrast that human civilisation presented in comparison with this
fairylike figment of his mind. He compared man in the state of
Nature--Rousseau’s “Nature”--with civilised man in the 18th century,
and then proceeded to show how impure, immoral and corrupt, was the
second kind of man as compared with the former. The fact that the whole
comparison was vitiated by the absurd impossibility of this so-called
“thinker’s” arbitrary definition of Nature, was only discovered
scores of years later, when the untold damage to which his insane
misunderstanding led, had long been past repair.
For the “Nature” of Rousseau was the Nature of our most successful
Victorian poets--all smiling meadows, babbling brooks, nodding flowers
and innocence. He had neither the profundity nor the honesty to see
Nature as she really is--immoral, hard, merciless and tasteless.[2]
Like our Victorian poets when Rousseau gazed upon a rustic scene, he
thought neither of the stoat in the hedge quietly devouring its field
mouse, nor of the starling in the coppice solemnly and methodically
hammering a snail to a pulp before swallowing it. He gave no thought
either to the pitiless and eternal conflict of all the vegetation at
his feet, or to the struggle probably going on in the adjoining village
between a beautiful child and the microbe of tuberculosis. He dwelt
only on that something which was not Man and proceeded to endow that
something, which was not Man, with all the qualities that his feverish
imagination regarded as desirable.
When, therefore, he proceeded to plant his “natural man” down in this
utterly fanciful scenario of Rousseau-esque “Nature,” he perforce drew
a picture even more distorted of humanity than he had already drawn of
Nature, and thus proceeded to his ultimate fatuous conclusion that “Man
was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”
Absurd and meaningless as this phrase was, it succeeded, as Lord Morley
has pointed out, in thrilling the generation to which it was uttered
in two continents; and it was not until a hundred years later that
someone appeared who demonstrated that Rousseau was not only a liar
but a pernicious liar. Meanwhile, Napoleon had proved to the French
people, in deeds if not in words, how ludicrously fantastic were the
ravings of this Genevan firebrand; but the philosophic demonstration
of his radical misunderstanding of the three words, “Freedom,” [p19]
“Nature,” and “Man,” had to be left to a later generation.
The fact that the French Revolution was the outcome of this radical
misunderstanding is now no longer contested by any serious thinker.
A searching and forcible re-definition of “Nature,” “Freedom,” and
“Man,” in the light of history, biology, psychology, and a sound
outlook on life and humanity, if it had been rapidly prepared and
widely circulated in Rousseau’s lifetime, might have defeated the
efforts of this Arch-charlatan to poison his own country and the world;
but, in those days, who dreamt that the misunderstanding, or the
deliberate misinterpretation, of three such simple words as Freedom,
Nature, and Man, could lead to so much horror and bloodshed?
The world at that time was only faintly aware of the far-reaching
practical effect even of sound ideas; how could it justly estimate the
consequences of false or unsound ideas?
Now, however, we know. There is no longer any excuse for us; our
lesson is before us. And, alas! to-day, we are confronted not by the
mere misunderstanding of three simple words, we are confronted by the
very much more formidable fact that there is scarcely one general
or abstract term in the whole of our language that has any definite
meaning. We are confronted by the imminent menace of no longer having
any language at all with which to appeal either to the reason or the
unreason of man.
All the words by which our life, our [p20] aspirations and our energy
can be directed, have long ago become so meaningless, as the result of
repeated falsification, mutilation and counterfeiting, that we may soon
be reduced to the expedients of animals and savages, in order to make
ourselves clear, and drown our voices in the clash of arms.
And yet it can be shown that these abstract and general terms, which
no longer have any definite meaning, or which have acquired an utterly
misleading meaning, do provoke emotions and feelings which are none the
less harmful for being indefinite and vague.
How is this possible? If it is claimed that a word has ceased to make
any intellectual or rational appeal, owing to repeated catachresis
or misunderstanding, how can it still provoke dangerous feelings
and emotions? If it fails, owing to the variety of ways in which it
is understood, from meeting with uniform interpretation, how can it
provoke uniform action?
A word may have ceased from making any intellectual appeal, and yet be
forcibly associated by word-counterfeiters and other agitators with
certain vague desiderata which defy analysis. For instance, suppose a
certain adult A. repeat again and again to a child B. that one day, if
it is obedient and amenable, it will be taken to “Chekko’s.” The child
may press for a description of “Chekko’s”; but all A. does is to nod
his head, smile with prophetical good humour, and say: “Ah, you’ll see.
It’s wonderful! It’s magic!”
Here we have a case of a child to whom the word “Chekko’s” means
literally nothing. It is, however, associated vaguely [p21] with
something mysteriously desirable. “Chekko’s” may have no real
existence, but certain emotions are nevertheless suscitated in the
child by the sound of the word, because it has been led to believe that
something dimly pleasant is associated with the name. Ultimately even a
flag inscribed with the word “Chekko’s” will make the child shout with
joy; a signpost with the direction: “To Chekko’s” will make it leap
with excitement, and a mere passing reference to the “Checko-Slovaks”
will lead it to suspect that these people must be a very pleasant and
happy nation.
A correct definition of “Chekko’s” given by someone whom the child
trusts, would suffice either to dispel the emotion provoked by the
sound, or else to confirm it, according to whether it had or had not
a real existence, and that existence corresponded with the child’s
fostered mental image of it. But in any case the process of dissuasion
would take time, and the re-definition would have to be inculcated upon
the child as assiduously as the false and hazy original association had
been.
It is possible, therefore, to provoke dynamic emotions by means of an
absolutely meaningless sound, even when the intellect of the listener
receives no appeal whatsoever.
In view of this elementary fact in psychology, the extreme danger of
having a very large number of both meaningless and inflammable words in
our current speech will perhaps begin to be obvious.
The fact that the word “Freedom” has now become practically
meaningless--even more meaningless than Rousseau made it, [p22]
because now it has not even a fictitious meaning--does not render it
a whit less potent in provoking cheers and wild enthusiasm when it is
shouted from the mystic eminence of a public platform.
Presumably when Rousseau spoke of “Freedom” he meant a certain lack
of compulsion regarding actions which are peculiar to civilisation,
a certain absence of constraint in regard to conventions that do not
harass the savage. The savage does not require to wear clean linen,
he does not require to wear a hat, he may if he choose eat with his
fingers, or come to breakfast unshaven; he may have three or four
wives, he may eat human flesh, he may live in the open and shoot down
his prey without considering whether it belongs to the squire or to
the lord of the manor. Rousseau cannot have meant anything but this
by “Freedom.” If Rousseau had been told that while it was true that
the savage does not require to perform much that the civilised man has
to perform, the civilised man, on the other hand, is “free” from many
a duty that is incumbent on the savage, he would have perceived that
to drop the constraints of civilisation for those of barbarism merely
amounted to exchanging one form of bondage for another. For instance,
the savage of certain climes has to tattoo his flesh, sometimes with
great pain; he has to observe certain rigid taboos, he has to hunt for
his food, he has to fight every day of his life against wild animals
and the hostile tribe of his neighbourhood into the bargain; he has to
work hard during boyhood and early [p23] manhood to acquire efficiency
in the arts of the chase and of war; he is obliged to recognise a
chieftain, etc. In fact, it could be shown that Man in a “state of
nature” is perhaps even more constrained by conventions and laws than
civilised man. Only by deliberately falsifying the evidence--that is
to say, by giving a thoroughly distorted notion of Nature, would it be
possible to contend that man “in a state of nature” is more “free” than
civilised man. Rousseau, as we have seen, however, did not hesitate to
falsify the evidence. Hence he was able to say: “Man is born free and
everywhere he is in chains.”
But if we turn to the modern idea of Freedom, we shall find that it
is even more difficult to understand than Rousseau’s. For at least
Rousseau’s “Freedom” can be traced to a romantic distortion of the true
attributes of “Nature”; the modern idea of “Freedom” can be traced to
nothing.
In its two forms, the alleged desideratum of modernity. Freedom and
Liberty, means literally nothing.
If we put the questions--freedom and liberty from what? and freedom
and liberty for what?--it will be seen immediately that there is no
definite idea whatsoever behind the words. Freedom or liberty as an
aim, presupposes emancipation from a yoke. What is the yoke from which
modern man wishes to be free? Is it work? Is it timed work?
Freedom or liberty as an aim presupposes emancipation from a yoke for
a definite purpose. What is this purpose? Is it a higher or a lower?
Is it more entertainment [p24] or more usefulness? Is it desirable or
undesirable?
To none of these questions is there any answer, because the modern
words Freedom and Liberty connote nothing. And the same applies to such
words as Equality, Right, Justice. These mere sounds have ceased to
be words. But they all imply some mysterious desideratum which it may
be worth while fighting for. They are missiles, fireworks, unmusical
chords--anything! All they have retained of their original nature, is
the power of directing energy. They no longer call up any definite or
expressible idea.
Now when the most hortatory and inspiriting words of a language have
ceased to have any definite meaning, the nation using that language is
in imminent danger of internal discord and rupture, and the beneficent
influence of indolence and inertia alone can avert a catastrophe. The
only question is, have we sufficient native indolence and inertia to
tide over this crisis in our language?
Even if we have, the Continent has not, and ultimately by infection or
contagion, our inertia and indolence, too, will be overcome.
What is the remedy? What is the corrective? What is the best means of
resisting the influence of the Continent and of the corrosive elements
at home without relying too confidently upon our negative qualities
alone?
Strange as it may sound, the present writer suggests, as one of the
most direct roads to a recovery of political and national [p25]
health, in the first place, that the disease of language should be
cured. Everywhere, in the whole of the civilised world, disease of
language is rampant. That country alone will resist and survive the
revolutionary epidemic, which first cures its disease of language.
But how is this to be done?
The grand method, the best method, would of course consist in
re-creating a common and uniform culture, in which the spiritual words
and phrases of the national language would find a new and definite
place, a fresh and unmistakable association.
This, however, is perhaps a counsel of perfection. For where are
the men to-day who would be prepared to embark on this gigantic
undertaking, even if they were equipped for it? It is possible, and
the material for its accomplishment lies close at hand. But where are
the free spirits who have the courage, and who are capable of the
solidarity, that would be required for such a task?
The second best method, and the one more compatible with the power of
our best men of to-day, would consist in rescuing the meaningless terms
of our language--and there are thousands of them--from their pointless,
unattached and almost disreputable existence. It would consist in
re-defining them in the realistic light of history, biology and
psychology, and in the light of a sane and sound outlook on humanity
and the world. It would consist, further, in creating a convention as
rigorous as the existing convention regarding all reference to sexual
questions and organs, according to which [p26] it would be regarded
as an act of gross immorality and indecency to commit the sin of
catachresis or abuse against any of the words thus re-defined, and it
should be incumbent upon the ordinary citizen to report to the nearest
police station any such breach of decency which he might happen to
discover while reading his daily paper, or a novel, or any treatise
printed after the promulgation of the law.
How many false ideals, false aspirations, and pernicious creeds and
doctrines would then be dispersed? How many agitators, tub-thumpers,
self-seeking bell-wethers, would then be put to flight! How many
politicians would then starve! But how fresh and crisp the air of every
debating chamber would then become!
This is a possible and highly practical method of dealing with our
present situation. There is no excuse for its not being adopted. When
once it had achieved all it could achieve, the masses should be made to
benefit from the results of the undertaking. Indeed, it would be more
or less futile if they were not made to benefit in this way. They would
then become the alert and merciless critics of people who now sway them
as easily as if they were corn in the wind; and seven-eighths of our
present-day literature would cease from being published.
It is the surest, the speediest, and the most fruitful method of
saving what still remains of Order and Culture. But it is a stupendous
undertaking and one that will exact a heavy toll from all those who
embark upon it.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: He used the word in the sense of the “proletariat” or the
“masses.”]
[Footnote 2: Perhaps Tennyson should be honourably excepted here (see
_In Memoriam_ LVI., line 15); but while the realistic estimate of
Nature is certainly hinted at in the lines referred to, it could not be
claimed that Tennyson consistently upheld this attitude.]
[p27] CHAPTER I
THE PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY
“There is nothing wrong either in great wealth or in extensive
property, provided that it be wisely administered.”--William Cobbett
(_Rural Rides_).
Behind most of the modern hostility towards established and traditional
institutions, it is not only a matter of mere caution, but also
essentially scientific to suspect a certain amount of physical as well
as psychical exhaustion. Modern mankind is tired, both bodily and
spiritually. The pale fireless eyes of our urban adults alone ought
to make us suspect the truth about this matter. Two thousand years of
the increasing complication of Life, during which man’s attention has
had ever more and more detail to occupy it, together with a feeling
of very genuine disillusionment on the part of the most enlightened
regarding the highest ideals of the past; two thousand years, moreover,
of progressive debilitation, during which the resisting powers of
exuberant health have gradually and steadily been worn down--must have
had their effect upon recent generations, and materially impaired
their ability to face the institutions of their forefathers with their
forefathers’ spirit, health and understanding.
It cannot be repeated too often that it would be gravely unscientific,
nay imprudent, to proceed to an examination of the modern hostility to
traditional ideas and principles without taking into account [p28] the
attitude of mind, the tone of mind, and the degree of health, of those
who represent this hostility. The fact that modern books on political
questions usually take as their data the very conclusions to which this
hostility has led, without previously determining the validity of the
whole standpoint, or discovering the kind of minds that are responsible
for it, need not deter us from departing from the customary method. Nor
can our superior caution in this respect be fairly interpreted as bias.
It must surely be clear to most of us that, not only we ourselves, but
all our contemporaries as well, are radically and incurably weary. Our
physical resistance against disease is as seriously in peril as is our
spiritual resistance against error, or against those ideals and desires
that can appeal only to invalids.
Where life is ebbing, however, her most fundamental principles, her
most inexorable demands, must be losing the force of their appeal. An
ear is therefore lent ever more willingly and eagerly to doctrines and
precepts which are non-vital, which already have about them the bitter
effluvia of death; and it becomes ever more and more difficult to
withstand the fascination of this new persuasiveness.
But because Man has reached a degree of lassitude that induces him to
listen more patiently and submissively than of yore, to doctrines and
precepts of decline and decay, it does not follow that these doctrines
are irresistible either in their rational or emotional appeal. It does
not even follow that their _rational_ dressing is any more [p29] above
suspicion than they are themselves. The attempt intellectually to
justify and bolster up a sickly tenet may be as unhealthy as that tenet
itself.
It is suspicion, above all, that is needed wherever we turn in our
modern storehouse of ideals and panaceas--suspicion coupled with the
conviction that man is desperately weary in body and soul.
Now there is a state of weariness and apathy in which things that
have become out of gear are no longer readjusted or repaired, but
deliberately and ruthlessly destroyed. Each of us can picture in our
mind’s eye, the behaviour of the nervous invalid who, too exhausted
to repair a persistently clanging bell, tears down the whole fitting,
wires and all, so that the disturbing sound may cease for ever. Such
an act is typical of exhaustion. It amounts to a deep-seated surrender
of the power of repair. Brain and body tissues that are not themselves
regularly repaired or recreated can hardly be expected to devise the
means of repairing or recreating other things.
Thus we should expect the modern and exhausted mind to proceed in its
corrective lust, not by means of readjustment, but by amputation,
not by therapeutic art, but by extirpation. There are thousands of
bells clanging discordantly in the house of civilisation to-day. The
temptation of the modern man is therefore to tear them down, wires and
all.
Whenever anything goes wrong--and things cannot always work smoothly
in society, particularly in vast and complex communities like those
of Western Europe--it is [p30] natural for a certain large element
in the population to proceed by means of suppression and amputation,
by lopping off some creation of the past, and advancing the most
convincing arguments for so doing.
If the Lords fail us, the simplest method is to do away with them. If
individual enterprise falls short of its promise, a clamour is raised
for its abolition. Family life goes wrong, married life goes wrong,
and the remedy suggested is to make the dissolution of the marriage
tie easier. It does not matter whether you are destroying a portion of
your organism and therefore impoverishing yourself thereby, for you
are simplifying your task, and this for an invalid is an achievement
of maximum importance. Everything thus falls into a process of general
disintegration, all troublesome appendages are sloughed off, and the
body of civilisation is gradually truncated or dissolved. Meanwhile,
however, since every step in this process of decomposition receives
the most convincing intellectual support, no one suspects that there
are other and better methods of setting to work. It never occurs to
the typical modern mind that if institutions are to be abolished as
fast as degenerate people show themselves unable to uphold them,
then an immediate and far more speedy way of refuting and abolishing
all civilisation would be to fill all its leading positions, and to
invest all its institutions, with raw savages from the Cannibal Isles.
Every institution and tradition would then break down, and presumably
the modern mind would be satisfied that the only remedy [p31] would
consist in the abolition of all institutions and traditions.
Long ago the present writer pointed out that to set a buffoon on the
throne is not to confute monarchy, and yet this is the principle we
work upon in all our reforms. We never once question whether it may not
be modern man himself who is wrong or decadent. This at least might
lead us to look in the proper direction for improvement. We merely
assail with savage fury every institution that modern man can no longer
run to his and our own satisfaction.
Thus the instinctive and morbid indolence of sickness, to which
amputation and suppression are naturally the most tempting corrective
methods, becomes the standard of judgment for all ills; and where
ignorant minds are added to sick minds, the natural bankruptcy of
ignorance joins hands with the destructive lust of the sick, and the
two together, hatchet in hand, set out to “reform” the world.
Can anyone doubt that this is indeed what we are witnessing on all
sides? And does not the very specious seductiveness of the Socialist
and Bolshevist propaganda lead us to suspect that here, at least, we
are invalids listening to invalids?
The principle of Private Property is being assailed on all sides. It is
now the fashion to talk glibly of the evanescence of private property,
just as it is the fashion to be suffering from pyorrhœa or caries.
Private property is another of the features of ancient societies which
in this Muddle Age has got out of order; and the consequence is, as we
should expect, that it is beginning [p32] to be suggested--nay, it has
already been loudly proclaimed--that private property, as the root of
all evils, should be abolished.
Now in this new project of vandalism, we have not only one symptom
of disease, but two. For, while we have our old friend, the morbid
indolence of the sick, which cannot recreate or repair, but must
suppress, we also have a frontal attack on Life itself, pressed by the
forces of decay and disintegration disguised as Utopians. For private
property is a principle of Life.
The fact that this is everywhere apparent, does not, of course,
prevent the myopic from overlooking it; it should, however, prevent
the multitude from being deceived, and we believe the multitude are
still not deceived. For it is obviously the multitude, the vast mass of
mankind, who have the least of this world’s goods, who should be the
first to be duped about this matter; and yet how long it is taking to
convince them! How tenacious they seem of the old principle! How deeply
must they believe in private property in order, with their handful of
household sticks and baubles, to resist the morbid lie which is being
reiterated by a thousand moribund voices all round them, that private
property is wrong.
It has been said that private property is a principle of Life. What,
then, is its biological value?
Its biological value is the same as the biological value of the best
life itself.
To be quite plain, Life as a whole does not represent a general
movement upwards, from the standpoint of quality. On the contrary.
The great majority of Life’s activities [p33] have a gravitating or
descending tendency--that is to say, in a large number of organisms,
acquired embellishments or acquired faculties and qualities more
frequently have to be dropped than retained in the course of
generations. Spencer has shown conclusively that by far the greater
number of existing organisms are the degenerate descendants of
higher species (see _Collected Essays_, Vol. I., p. 379). The laws
of evolution, therefore, cover millions of cases of _retrograde
metamorphosis_, or change consisting of the loss of complex qualities
or members for the purpose of survival. And in all these cases of
retrograde metamorphosis, instead of the identity of the individual
becoming extended, it is actually diminished or reduced.
Development is, therefore, really the exception rather than the
rule. It covers only those cases in which a cumulative or forward
metamorphosis has taken place. It is characteristic only of those
species in which identity has been extended. Indeed, development might
be called the law of higher life, or of that life which advances by
gradual steps from the homogeneous to the heterogenous, which, in fact,
_unfolds itself_ only to reveal and to perpetuate ever fresh and new
attributes and activities.
Development is a name which, though not descriptive of all organic
evolution,[3] certainly describes the changes of a species _that has
grown_ through its thousands of generations--grown, that is to say,
in the sense of having become more and more--more and more capable of
multifarious activities and adaptations.
Development in this correct and restricted sense of “growth,” thus
implies “becoming more,” “extending identity.” Becoming more,
therefore, is a principle of higher life.
Now what does this conclusion necessarily involve in the terms of
humanity? It means that the _ascending_ line of life in the genus Homo
Sapiens, at least, has not only become more and more, but must also
have been characterised by the spiritual counterpart of this physical
striving, which consists in desiring to become more and more--that is
to say, to extend identity.
Any slackening, any reversal, any paralysis of this desire to become
more and more, may thus be regarded as the beginning of the other
movement--the movement of retrograde development, of decline.
In each healthy individual of a truly _developing_ species, we should
therefore expect to find the _conscious_ counterpart of the principle
of higher life, which will be the desire to become more and more, to
extend identity.
To assail this desire to become more and more is therefore tantamount
to a conspiracy against life, it is tantamount to a denial of
the healthiest instinct of the species. It is the hand of death
outstretched across the _ascending road_ of the animal man.
Call this adverse criticism or hostility [p35] what you
will--Socialism, Communism, or Bolshevism, it is all one. It is the
cry of those who have lost ascending or developing life’s strongest
instinct against those who still possess it. Or else it is the cry of
the envious in life’s battle, who pretend to have lost life’s strongest
instinct, in order to acquire power over those who have not.
I shall hardly be called upon to draw the obvious conclusion. How
does, how can, the individual of a species that falls naturally under
the head of Development manifest this incessant striving to become
more, which is the conscious counterpart of the physical evolution
of the race, except by means of private property? How can he achieve
this becoming more which, as we have seen, constitutes an extension of
his identity, without private property? I do not refer here to those
exceptional individuals who are content with a non-material expression
of this “becoming more,” but to the mass of mankind, in which
individual extension _must_ take a material form. Private property is
the only means, and this private property is so closely identified with
individual extension that, as we know, in certain Ages and climes,
wives and children have been included in the category.
It constitutes the gratification, nay the very necessity, of one of
the deepest instincts of man. It is indistinguishable, inseparable,
from the law of growth; hence the obstinate attachment even the poorest
still reveal in regard to it; hence the uphill work which the preachers
of Death and Decay, still find their propaganda to be.
The very morality of development says [p36] “Yea” to this desire to be
and to become more. The very morality of development identifies growth,
in the individual sense, with the general growth of the species, and
therefore sanctifies and hallows the instinct of self-extension which
is the instinct of private property. Only the sincere and whole-hearted
pessimist can logically assail the principle of private property, for
he alone can honestly desire to cripple his fellows, paralyse their
life instinct, and curtail their existence on the globe.
It is hardly necessary here to refer to the dawn of the sense of
private property in the lower animals. This has been done often enough.
Suffice it to point out, however, that in them also it is most apparent
where the variety of activities and adaptations is most complex--among
the bees, the ants, the dogs and the cats. True, the private property
in question is only food, or matter which will one day be used as food.
But is this not true of all property? Has not the revolution in Russia
shown that all property is merely so much frozen food, so much wealth
that can ultimately be bartered for nourishment? And does not this
again point to its deep relationship to the highest law of growth?
The important outcome of this inquiry into the ultimate relation of
private property to biology and to the highest laws of life, however,
is that it enables one to recognise the Socialist, the Bolshevist, and
the Communist (where they are most sincere and fervent) in their true
guise--that is to say, as the convinced and determined opponents, not
only of a particular class, but of Life [p37] itself; as pessimists
and bitter misanthropists, who do not scruple to conceal their
hostility to an important life-principle beneath the most engaging and
most unctuous of altruistic poses.
But then is all well with the principle of private property to-day? And
are the Socialists, Bolshevists and Communists all wrong?
All is certainly not well with the principle of private property as
it is allowed to work in our societies at the present day. Hence the
colourable warrant that is given to the attacks of the Socialists and
Communists upon it. Hence, too, the plausibility of their claims. For
it is the simplest of feats to confuse an issue, and in societies where
the right of private property is abused, it is easy to convince the
thoughtless that the thing abused, and not the abuse itself, is the
real curse.
It is, therefore, readily admitted that there is a good deal that is
wrong about private property as a principle practised by modern man;
the wrong, however, is no more inherent in the principle itself, than
cruelty to children, because it happens to occupy the attention of a
large and wealthy society in England, is inherent in the principle of
parenthood. And it is because the present evils of the distribution of
wealth are not inherent in the principle of private property, that it
is ridiculous--not only ridiculous, but also highly suspicious--to wish
to sweep away the institution itself in order to remedy the evils that
now unquestionably account for its disrepute.
It has been shown why this desire to [p38] sweep away the institution
is doubly suspicious:--
(_a_) Because it is the natural resort of sick and exhausted people,
who are incapable of repairing or recreating anything.
(_b_) Because it is the action of people who are hostile not merely
to private property, but to Life in general. (The fact that they are
usually completely unconscious of this hostility only renders them all
the more dangerous.)
The recognition of the right of private property is probably the oldest
of all human principles. It is seen in all great civilisations. Every
great culture has been built upon it. All societies, however, have not
created the evils of modern Western civilisation. This alone ought to
have provided a hint in the right direction. It ought to have been seen
that the evils attending the distribution of wealth to-day, are evils
more or less peculiar to the kind of culture we have evolved.
What are these evils?
(1) The chief evil of all is that by our present method of wealth
distribution, the best people are not infrequently the most sorely
oppressed, the most severely chastised by poverty and lack of power.
The correlative evil to this is that those who are powerful to-day
through wealth, are frequently so hopelessly unfitted to hold their
position that the system which elevates such people to their present
eminence seems as if it must be bad to the root.
(2) The next in importance is that life at present is organised in such
wise that poverty does not mean merely humbleness [p39] of station;
for which of us would object to that? It means being compelled to
perform some of the most heart-rending, most unhealthy, most besotting
and characterless work that the economy of the community has to offer.
Society should be organised in such a way that either filthy and
besotting labours should not be necessary or else that where they are
necessary, they should entail compensating advantages.
(3) The next in importance is that, as society is organised at present,
poverty, which might be readily and cheerfully accepted by thousands
of us, aye, actually preferred in some cases--now almost necessarily
signifies bad air, ugly surroundings, poor food, and consequently an
unsecured bill of health. Accessibility to conditions in which good air
and beauty are, as it were, happily wedded, is becoming ever more and
more the restricted privilege of the wealthy.
(4) Owing to a misunderstanding of the true nature of social unity,
wealth, or extensive private property, now gives certain classes the
power of trespassing upon the life-needs of their fellows, without,
however, being amenable to law--cornering markets, levying undue
profits, destroying beautiful sites, supporting a host of societies
which are simply parasitic pests on the nation’s back, unwise disposal
of fortunes, etc.
(5) Owing to the educational advantages associated with wealth--an
association which is quite unessential and arbitrary--modern society
imposes a certain measure of benightedness and ignorance as an
inevitable inheritance upon poverty, which is not in the least
essential to poverty _per se_. [p40]
After this brief enumeration of some of the leading evils of our
present system of wealth distribution, is it not, however, more than
ever clear that none of these evils is inherent in the principle of
private property itself? Who would venture to prove that any one of the
wrongs enumerated was (_a_) either inherent in the principle of private
property, or (_b_) irremediable without the sacrifice of that principle?
If we consider the first and chief wrong which consists in the fact
that private property at the present day frequently elevates to power
people who are totally unfitted to wield any power at all, while it as
frequently condemns to impotence, obscurity and ignominy, people who
would be eminently fitted to wield power, we realise at once that the
fault does not lie in the amount of property held by these people, but
upon the significance which current opinion and the prevailing estimate
of wealth attaches to the accident of great or small possessions in
either case.
It is well known, everybody indeed has heard of it, that in certain
cultures that have existed and still exist, the significance of great
possessions has not been the same as that which Western civilisation
has chosen to attach to them. The Brahmin of India, for instance,
although he is doomed to poverty in the most literal sense, is the
most highly respected among rich and poor alike. He rules and directs
opinion, neither because he is rich, nor because he is poor, but
because he is profoundly wise, and because power does not happen
to be connected, in the enlightened Hindu mind, [p41] with great
possessions. It can be shown, and has been shown often enough, that the
famous mendicant monks of the Middle Ages did not increase their power,
but actually forfeited it, when they acquired riches and became as the
other holy orders.
Evidently, then, the equation Wealth = Importance = Power, is not an
inevitable one. It does not depend upon mathematical necessity. It is
a perfectly arbitrary association of ideas, which is the result of a
singular and quite gratuitous valuation.
The fact that it is deeply seated in the prejudices and prepossessions
of all Western peoples, appears to give it the sanction almost of a
social law. It would, however, constitute the acme of imprudence and
superficiality to allow oneself to be led by this apparent unanimity
into the belief that it either denotes or implies an ordinance of Fate.
The unanimity with which reverence is now felt for wealth alone, is
only one of the many instances which it would be possible to give, of
the stubborn and determined manner in which an arbitrary valuation
strikes root in the heart of whole nations, when once it has been
systematically and painstakingly inculcated upon them. It is one of
those cases which inspire with hope all those who may be confronted
with the apparently thankless task of altering the prejudices and
prepossessions of a people. For, if it has been possible erroneously to
raise wealth to the highest among our valuations, without a trace of
social law to help us, it is clear that it must be possible to alter
that valuation, to “transvalue” it, [p42] as the technical phrase has
it, and to bring mankind back to a more rational understanding of the
proper equipment of power, which consists chiefly of wisdom, virtue,
character and resolution.
Nobody denies, of course, that when once wisdom, virtue, character and
resolution, happen to combine in the same individual, the addition of
wealth may make that individual exceptionally precious; but wealth,
as we frequently see it to-day, endowing with power people who are
neither wise, virtuous, characterful nor resolute, is little less than
a national curse.
For what does wealth mean? It means simply that the owner of it has
a purchasing power over the services of his fellows. It by no means
signifies that this purchasing power will of necessity be wisely,
virtuously or profitably exercised. Wherever it is not wisely,
virtuously and profitably exercised, therefore, it becomes a scourge.
The power itself becomes _violence_; and it is incumbent upon the
laws of all well-regulated communities to suppress at least man-made
violence. The besetting vice of all Western societies, whether
Monarchies, Aristocracies, Republics, or “Democracies,” has been and
is still that they have never taken adequate steps to suppress this
particular kind of violence.
But the remedy for such violence would not consist in abolishing the
principle of private property. You might just as well abolish knives
because they are frequently used by homicidal maniacs. The remedy
consists in so modifying the life of the nation, and the prejudices and
prepossessions of the [p43] nation, that wealth may not necessarily
mean power, and that poverty may not necessarily mean ignominy,
ignorance and ill-health[4]; also that it should be difficult for
material success to be achieved by people who are frequently the most
contemptible members of the community both in spiritual and physical
gifts.
All those who question the possibility of such an achievement in the
recasting of values, are invited to dwell upon the genesis and growth
of the prevalent ruling equation, Wealth = Importance = Power. They are
invited, furthermore, to discover the moment in history when another
valuation showed signs of becoming prevalent, and to ascertain by what
means, foul or otherwise, it was made to fail. Then only, in the light
of what they found, will they be able to decide whether a new equation
and a new valuation have not even now a chance of being initiated,
accepted, and universally believed.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: An enormous amount of confusion has been caused by the
loose application of the term “Development,” to all processes of
change in life. Strictly speaking, development means unfolding. But
the process by which the tape-worm has degenerated from the higher
species to which it once belonged is not a process of unfolding or
development, but one of loss and reduction, one of gradual truncation
and limitation.]
[Footnote 4: It should be remembered, however, that in a society in
which success really did depend upon the possession of the highest
moral and bodily qualities that the community could display,--which is
by no means the case at present,--poverty or failure would undoubtedly
have a certain inexpungeable stigma upon it; and quite rightly too.
That which removes the stigma from poverty or failure to-day, in the
eyes of the enlightened, is the fact that riches and success are
frequently achieved by people who could not possibly lay claim to any
high moral and bodily qualities,--not to mention the highest.]
[p44] CHAPTER II
JUSTICE
“Si nos coeurs battent, c’est dans ce but ... c’est pour que nous
puissions compter sur l’avenir et savoir s’il y a dans les choses
d’ici bas une justice immanente qui vient à son jour et à son
heure[5].”--L. Gambetta (Cherbourg speech. August 9th, 1880).
A discussion of the idea of justice almost necessarily precedes the
subject of the next chapter, for the kind of justice which is the
object of public clamour outside the law and police-courts, and beyond
the dealings of man with man, provides one of the principal arguments
to those who believe in human equality.
In this essay, then, it is clear that we shall not be concerned either
with the justice which includes the administration of the law, and
the incidence of the law of any country, or with the justice which
relates to the unwritten rules of conduct governing the commerce of
men and women; but rather with that idea of equity which, while it
enjoys a fast hold upon the imagination of all Western peoples, is
supposed to have an existence apart from statutes, codes, regulations
and by-laws, and human conventions. It is an abstraction, somewhat
like the idea of equality; but it is not a mathematician’s abstraction,
it is the abstraction of a moralist. It arises out of the idea of a
moral order--that is to say, of a supposed universal tendency to arrive
at a perfect equilibrium between deserts and rewards, and it assumes
that the moment this perfect balance is disturbed, a violation of this
abstract justice--Gambetta’s “_justice immanente_,”--is supposed to
have occurred.
To take an instance which illustrates this notion of justice, it is
popularly supposed that for a child, who can have committed no crime
sufficiently great to deserve severe punishment, to be born in a
sordid home, in a still more sordid city-quarter, of drunken parents,
some disturbance of the balance of justice must have occurred--a
disturbance which, if it is to be corrected, must require some kind of
compensation. If the compensation cannot be conceived as forthcoming in
this life, another life is postulated, in which the proper equilibrium
between deserts and rewards;[sic] will be restored. It is not enough
to say that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto
the third and fourth generation. Although the ancient Jewish view of
universal justice doubtless required some such explanation, and found
it satisfactory, the modern view of “immanent justice” is not satisfied
by this method of settling the question. Indeed, the very idea that
children should expiate their parents’ sins is abhorrent to the modern
mind, steeped as it is in this notion of justice. It only consents
to it as a fact in the face of overwhelming [p46] physiological and
biological evidence, and, even then, takes refuge from the apparent
harshness of the law, in the settled conviction that somewhere,
somewhen, compensation will be provided for the expiatory suffering.
It is the suffering that can be traced to no particular _transgression_
on the part of the individual, that chiefly outrages the modern man;
that is why it seems fair to conclude that this notion of immanent
justice has a moral foundation.[6]
As a matter of fact, there is nothing more unjust than this notion of
justice, but its injustice is by no means obvious.
There is no outcry when a murderer is hanged, although psychology,
heredity and even sociology, may be called to witness that his act was
as inevitable as is the crippledom of the child born of tainted blood.
There is no outcry when a vicious reprobate dies in poverty and pain.
There is no outcry when an habitual criminal ends his days on the
treadmill. Morality here receives its tribute. Chemistry, physiology,
biology, and the laws of heredity that derive from them are superseded
by the moral bias, and there appears to be no violation of that
“immanent” justice when one of Nature’s born ne’er-do-wells comes to a
sad end in a prison quadrangle.
In cases of suffering which are less easily traced to an apparently
deliberate transgression of moral laws, however, a miscarriage of
universal justice is supposed to have occurred, and the sympathy of
all, and even the indignation of some, are immediately aroused.
It is true that attempts have been made to withhold even this sympathy,
as in the case of the second commandment already referred to above;
but the best instance is that of David’s famous observation in the
37th Psalm: “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen
the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread.” This, however, is
so obviously a desperate endeavour to square a moral reading of the
universe, or the conception of an eternal justice behind all phenomena,
with the spectacle of misery and indigence, that its transparency
offends the dullest vision. It is not unlike the attitude of some
Eugenists who would argue that the poorly remunerated of to-day
should be prevented from multiplying because they are not only the
_unfit_, but the _undesirable_. To call them unfit is biologically
correct; for it merely amounts to saying that they are unadapted to
their environment. The idea of undesirability is, however, smuggled in
gratuitously, only in order to try to account for what would otherwise
appear an injustice. If the poor be made to appear as lying under a
stigma, [p48] the difficulty presented by the apparent injustice of
their position is easily removed.[7]
In the same way the necessity of condoling with an invalid is
unconsciously resented by most of us when we endeavour, particularly
to the invalid’s face, to ascribe his or her trouble to some glaring
imprudence or violation of rational living, through which we infer that
the illness or indisposition has been brought about. We thus reduce it
to a pain or penalty that the sufferer has _deserved_, and in this way
we release our minds from the constant preoccupation concerning justice
and injustice.
Women, who are very much less social in their instincts, and,
therefore, much harder than men, repeatedly behave in this way, even
with their own children; and before they make a movement to relieve
suffering, their lips will have pronounced innumerable reasons why the
particular indisposition or pain confronting them is the sufferer’s own
fault.
Why did David say that he had never seen the righteous forsaken nor
his seed begging bread? Why do certain Eugenists try their hardest
to attach some stigma to poverty, or to what they call the poorly
remunerated? And why do people suddenly heap all kinds of blame upon
the head of an unfortunate man, woman or child, who has suddenly
contracted an illness?
It is suggested that the reason is because the acceptance of the view
that there is a moral order to the universe, implies two conditions:
(_a_) That nothing occurs that is not just; (_b_) that, therefore,
there is no suffering that is not in some way retribution or penalty.
When confronted with any form of suffering, therefore, the first
impulse of everybody trained in this school of thought is an attempt,
at once, to square the particular example of unhappiness before them
with this notion of universal justice; and if it will not square,
without supposing some ultimate compensation that will balance it, or
some pain or crime that is sufficient to account for it, some such
ultimate compensation or some such transgression is quickly imagined,
which seems to satisfy the requirements of “immanent justice.”
If it is quite impossible to discover a sin or a crime in the
individual that will account for the individual’s suffering--as, for
instance, when a child is born of diseased or drunken parents--when,
moreover, doubts are beginning to be felt, as they are to-day, in a
large number of minds, regarding the possibility of compensation in
another world for undeserved miseries in this world--then a gross
injustice is supposed to have occurred, and everybody who looks at the
universe through moral glasses, feels acutely uncomfortable.
“Why should Tommy Jones,” they say, “be born of diseased or drunken
parents, when Thomas Vere de Vere was born of healthy or sober parents!
It is unjust!”
They are indignant, and they look indignant, and those among them
who cannot believe in an after-life in which this apparently [p50]
monstrous miscarriage of “immanent justice” will be rectified, become
social reformers who are prepared to fight, and lead others to fight
for--justice!
Those people, on the other hand, who are persuaded that their religion
can explain anything, and who enjoy the most determined optimism where
the suffering of others is concerned, have yet another loophole of
escape from the disagreeable certainty that a miscarriage of universal
justice has occurred. Nodding their heads gravely and wisely, they say:
“Who can tell? Providence moveth in mysterious ways. May not these
sufferers be the most sorely tried because they are the most loved? For
whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”[8]
Everything is done, every expedient is tried in order to escape from
the maddening certainty that suffering is possible without a sin or a
crime having been committed. When finally it is discovered that such
things as pain and misery do co-exist with innocence, or at least with
a lack of guilt, then the feeling arises that an injustice has been
perpetrated which must at all costs be corrected. And since eternal, or
universal, or immanent justice cannot be held responsible, man himself
and his civilisation are frequently accused of having been guilty of an
injustice of which neither is in any way capable.
What is it that has forced this conviction upon mankind? Failing the
comforting assurances of religion, which postulates a heaven in which
the uneven balance of pain and pleasure is adjusted, and a deity who
chastens those whom he most loves, why is it that at the sight of
unearned misery and pain the average man has a feeling of revolt, as if
a primary law of the universe had been wantonly outraged?
I have suggested that the average man reads morality into phenomena,
that he imagines that the world is a moral world, and that consequently
pain and pleasure alike must have a moral explanation or cause. It is
this that creates the idea of an “immanent” justice.
But, if we contemplate the world as a whole, what justification have
we for postulating a moral order of phenomena? Why should we expect
something so essentially peculiar to human society to pervade the
design of things in general?
As a matter of fact, from the standpoint of civilised human society,
Nature is utterly immoral, Life is hopelessly unjust. It is not only
the sinful young rabbit that provides the fox with his meal. It is
not only the guilty mouse that dies an agonising death in the cat’s
jaws. It is not only the dissipated sparrow that is torn to fragments
by the young of the sparrow-hawk. Neither is it only the vicious worm
that gets rationed out piecemeal to the young of the mole. And what
of the antelopes that fall victims to lions and tigers, the sheep and
cattle that fall victims to man, the pheasants that fall victims to our
sportsmen, the fish that fall victims to their larger fellows? Wherever
we look, we see suffering--undeserved suffering--aye, undeserved agony.
The world and Life are therefore essentially unmoral, they [p52] are
not concerned with justice. The rain falls both on the just and on
the unjust. The hurricane kills the just and the unjust alike. The
lightning burns the house of the just or unjust indifferently. Microbes
feed on the pure and undefiled virgin just as ravenously as upon the
polluted jade. Tuberculosis does not pick and choose; it kills where it
can. Virtue is no safeguard against it, neither is genius.
Wherever we look, either in the jungle or the prairie, we see the
blood-red fangs and the carmine claws of the bully rampant! Fair play?
Where is the fair play between the cat and the mouse? Where is the fair
play between the stoat and the shrew? Where is the fair play between
the wolf and the lamb? Justice? What is justice, where is justice in
Life and Nature? In the vegetable world, which is said to be inanimate,
the fierce uneven struggle is not even mitigated by the “sporting
chance” of escape.
Truth to tell, the word justice--whether immanent or otherwise--is
meaningless when applied to the universe. Nobody has ever dreamed of
thinking out the billions and billions of post-mortem compensations
which would be necessary to adjust the balance of only one year’s
rapine and slaughter in the world of nature. Nobody has ever dreamt
that such a calculation would even be possible. Injustice, if it have
any meaning at all in this respect, is therefore written large all over
the face of Life and Nature.
Sentimentalists, like Wordsworth and Rousseau, by wilfully turning
their backs upon [p53] the cruel sufferings of animals and insects in
Nature, have been able to present a picture of Life to the world as
attractive as it is false. But although pleasant lies of this sort are
bound ultimately to do a good deal of damage, and have actually done a
good deal of damage, they are also bound ultimately to be found out,
and it is to be hoped that there is then an end to them, once and for
all.
It is not accurate, therefore, to read a moral order into the Universe.
Life and Nature are essentially amoral. They are not concerned even
with the A.B.C. of morality. All life outside human society, therefore,
knows nothing of justice. On the contrary, “Life is appropriation,
injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity,
obtrusion of its own forms, incorporation, and, at the very least,
exploitation.”
There is no such thing as a natural balance of virtue and reward,
crime and punishment--even in the realm of social justice this balance
is difficult enough to achieve. Misery is frequently encountered
in Nature--in fact, universally so, divorced from sin. To perceive
anything else in Nature is to contemplate her through rather smoky
human spectacles--anthropomorphically.
If, then, this notion of justice exists at all, it is only in the fancy
of the morally prejudiced. Morality arises only in human society;
therefore justice is exclusively a social phenomenon, a social
expedient. It is not a universal law, but a concept of the social
human being. It is not a principle transcending social life; it is the
creation [p54] of social life, and means nothing outside it; it is
man-made, man-maintained.
In the light of this conclusion, what is meant, therefore, when Mrs.
Jelleby-Jones, of Hampstead, who is a welfare worker, exclaims over her
dinner to her husband that it seems so “unjust” that the poor little
diseased babies she has been inspecting that afternoon should have been
born with such a heavy handicap?
Whose injustice, what injustice does she mean? Does she know what she
means, and does she mean anything?
We have seen that if her statement is to have any meaning at all, it
must signify that mankind is unjust, that human society is unjust,
and that, therefore, her particular form of human society is unjust;
consequently that she and her husband, as forming part of that society,
are unjust.
Truth to tell, she will mean nothing half as intelligible as that; but
since this is the only meaning her remark can have, let us examine it
calmly.
She supposes an injustice to have been perpetrated because--say--three
babies she has seen were born diseased. This happens in every class,
irrespective of banking account, and the poor are not more unhealthy
than the rich. She says the babies will be handicapped. Their disease
is an obstacle in their road; therefore it is unjust. She is perfectly
right, in a sense, when she says that disease is an obstacle. But it
might be pointed out to her that to be born of stupid or criminally
disposed parents would also constitute an obstacle. Psychologists now
tell us that even to be born of parents [p55] who disagree constitutes
a grave obstacle in life. It might be argued that to be born of people
who can afford to keep cars also constitutes an initial obstacle,
because great comfort and luxury reduces moral fibre, paralyses energy,
and destroys eagerness for the fray. It might be pointed out to her
that to be born the son of the King of England is an obstacle in life,
because it limits freedom; a man cannot aspire to becoming Bishop of
Bristol if he is destined to become his Britannic Majesty. If being
born of sick or stupid parents is an injustice, all these cases are
injustices also.
Mrs. Jelleby-Jones might reply that illness or disease is at least an
obstacle that could be avoided, whereas to have as father the King of
England, is not a fate that could so easily be circumvented. Agreed!
But only flagrant cases of illness or disease are even noticeable.
What about those more subtle gradations of health or ill-health which
though they are frequently sufficiently virulent to convert a potential
genius into a merely talented man, or a potentially talented man into
a fool, are nevertheless not sufficiently glaring to be observed or
guarded against? Would Mrs. Jelleby-Jones argue that to be born of ugly
parents, for instance, is an injustice? To be ugly is certainly a great
disadvantage, particularly to the women of any tasteful country. Is it
also an injustice?
Look at it how we will, injustice, or inequality of endowment and of
chances of survival, is rooted in the very heart of Nature. Society
endeavours to mitigate Nature’s harsh rule by means of preventing
[p56] or assuaging unnecessary suffering, succouring indigence, and
trying to make ugly and botched people forget their ugliness; but
society cannot divorce herself completely from Nature. She is bound
to act with Nature and allow natural laws to operate with comparative
freedom in her midst. Particularly is this so with regard to the act
of pro-creation. Here is a natural process, and a natural passion, on
which society can only impose a certain modicum of order; she cannot do
away with it. Now, as we have seen, the sort of injustice that we are
examining in this chapter, is rooted in the very act of procreation,
which is essentially a natural act. Two people, male and female,
decide to procreate a third creature (more frequently they do not
give the third creature a thought)--a child, who can have no voice in
deciding whether it should be born or not, whether it should be born of
precisely those parents or not, or whether it should be their daughter
or their son, their legitimate or illegitimate offspring. It cannot
even choose which parent it will resemble. What could be more unjust?
It is obviously one of those manifestations of Nature, of Life, which
like all those we have been examining, is completely and hopelessly
unjust. It is the amoral character of Nature and Life persisting in
spite of moral or social conditions. This amount of Nature’s, or
Life’s, inevitable injustice must be accepted, or included with the
bargain which is life.
What, then, do these people really mean who rail against this so-called
injustice--this necessary survival of natural and vital [p57]
amorality within a moral society? They are, of course, extravagantly
stupid. They read their own back-parlour ethics into Nature’s scheme,
conclude erroneously that she is just, and then wherever this kind
of injustice appears, they throw the responsibility of it on to man
instead of on to Nature. They rightly assume that “injustice” can be
only man-made, and imagine that in railing against this “injustice”
of their fancy, they are really opposing something substantial, some
grievance that could, or ought to be, redressed, if society or the
government were more moral.
This “injustice” of their fancy, however, as we have seen, is built up
upon an idea of universal and eternal Justice which is a pure myth.
Justice exists nowhere outside civilised man’s own institutions, and
least of all in Nature. Whenever and wherever, therefore, Nature, pure
and undefiled, peeps out even in our civilised societies, as it does in
procreation, there also appears, and cannot fail to appear, what these
people call “injustice.”
Civilised man has done his utmost to mitigate Life’s natural
“injustices”--to use these people’s language--but since in order to
survive he is bound to allow Nature a certain modicum of free-play
within his societies, a certain modicum of so-called “injustice” cannot
be removed from even the most ideal and perfect community.[9]
Thus, far from this “injustice” of the stupid sentimentalists _à la_
Gambetta, etc., etc., being man-made, or man-contrived, it is man who
has done, and still does, his utmost to mitigate its asperities. But
because he cannot sweep it away without also sweeping away Life itself,
or without tampering with a very sacred function of his fellows, it is
preposterous to hold him responsible for it.
Apart from the creation and administration of law in an organised
society, therefore, and the accepted rules which control the treatment
of one man by another, or of a child by its parents, or _vice versâ_,
justice has no genuine existence at all. To complain about the absence
of a purely fantastic conception, therefore, is an absurdity. As well
might you complain that your son is born without wings, or that you
yourself do not possess seven-league boots.
In its essence, however, this act of setting up an impossible ideal,
which is supposed to belong to the very scheme of the universe,
amounts to an attitude of hostility to life, because it is tantamount
to a refusal to accept life as she is--that is to say, amoral. It is
equivalent to setting up a false scale of measurement, in order to
depreciate human society and its value.
When once these people are convinced that the “injustices” about which
they complain really are rooted in Life and Nature, they cry out
desperately: Look how dreadful Life is, she is unjust! But it is only
in their benighted brains that the ideal of justice was ever conceived
as inherent in phenomena, as a possible attribute of life Life is
amoral; therefore she is essentially beyond or beneath justice. You
can only [p59] love her or loathe her as she is. And it is a proof of
degeneracy to loathe her as she is. Hence degenerates invariably clothe
her with false attributes, and talk about a “_justice immanente_”; they
are not brave enough, or proud enough, to love her without trying to
paint her in the light of their back-parlour morality.
All Life’s light and shade, all her excitement, all her incitement to
man to compete with energy and spirit in her game, depends for more
than half its charm precisely on the fact that she is amoral--that is
to say, that she produces inequalities, contrasts and divergent types,
indifferently, lavishly, without taking thought, without mercy. Her
call is to the brave, to the stout of heart, and to the adventurous
and spirited. Those who in the midst of this great adventure cry out
“Injustice!” either misunderstand, or wilfully misrepresent the whole
scheme.
The alleged “injustices” of Life, can never be put right by man. They
are beyond his power to remedy, however just his laws may be. All he
can do is to mitigate the asperity of life for those of Nature’s less
fortunately endowed offspring, who cannot aspire to the highest ridge;
but even in doing this, he must be careful not to make it too easy for
Nature’s failures to multiply over abundantly, otherwise the race most
certainly deteriorates.
The modern tendency, therefore, which consists in deliberately
confounding the issue, by pointing to a number of Nature’s own
“injustices” as if they were the outcome of man-made law, man-made
conditions, [p60] and clamouring for them to be redressed, is wholly
vicious. It deceives the multitude, maddens them into a false sense of
their grievances, and frequently leads to disturbances which, though
they prove sadly destructive of life and treasure, _must_ leave things
more or less as they were, because the grievances chiefly complained
of, are frequently rooted in Life itself.
This does not mean that there are not man-made injustices in the
creation and administration of law. Unfortunately they are too often as
plentiful as those of Life itself. But by far the grossest so-called
injustices are those of Nature and Life, which cannot by any means be
removed, and least of all can they be even mitigated in a country whose
population distinguishes so imperfectly between grievances which can be
rightly brought home to man, and those that are inherent in the natural
order of existence, that while they blindly clamour for the removal of
the latter, the former, which might be corrected and are within man’s
power to correct, are generally left studiously alone.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: “If our hearts beat, it is with this object ... it is
in order that we may rely on the future and know whether there is an
all-pervading justice in the things of this world, which ultimately has
its day and comes to light at its appointed time.”]
[Footnote 6: The present writer has even heard women declare that
the lot of the female human being, with all its disabilities and
physical burdens, constitutes an “unjust” apportionment of pain and
pleasure when compared with the lot of the male. It is difficult to
discover what injustice is meant here, unless we conclude that women
who speak in this way have acquired from their stupid men-folk ideas
about a certain justice behind phenomena or in Nature, which in their
particular existence appears to be transgressed. In any case we are
quite safe in assuming that it cannot be an infringement of man’s
justice that is meant here. It must, therefore, be the imaginary
justice which is the subject of this essay, and which moral people read
into the universe.]
[Footnote 7: It would only be correct to say that the poor are the
_undesirable_ as well as being the _biologically unfit_, if successful
adaptation to modern conditions demanded the highest virtues and
abilities of which the community is capable.]
[Footnote 8: Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews. Chapter xii. 6.]
[Footnote 9: So long, that is to say, as free mating is not made a
criminal offence, and even then the harshness of the natural law will
only be partially mitigated.]
[p61] CHAPTER III
EQUALITY
“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men were created
equal; that they were endowed by their Creator with inalienable
rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.”--Thomas Jefferson ([10]Declaration by the Representatives
of the United States).
From whichever quarter the principle of human equality is approached,
it appears to recede into ever deeper dimness and obscurity the more
hotly it is pursued. What does this elusiveness signify? Has the
principle any reality at all? That is to say, is it something that
can be realised? Or is it the most unscrupulous lie that has ever
been sewn as a device upon the banner of a faction? In any case it
seems to provoke very real emotions. Thump your fist hard enough, and
shout from a public platform: “Ladies and gentlemen, what we want more
than anything else to-day, that which our birth, our common origin,
our common shape and stature--aye, even our common spark of Divine
Spirit--most surely guarantees us, is Equality, ladies and gentlemen,
the blessed condition of Equality!”
Pronounce the words emphatically enough, as your exordium, and your
whole audience will cheer and applaud as with one voice.
Not one of the assembled crowd will protest indignantly that you have
been talking nonsense. Everybody will really believe that your words
have some meaning, and a beautiful meaning.
We have already seen, however, that a word does not require to have
any precise meaning, or any definite association whatever, in order
to excite pleasurable feelings in those who hear it pronounced, or in
order to provoke these people to energetic action. Is Equality perhaps
one of these empty, inflammatory words?
It is originally a term borrowed from mathematics. The mathematician
says:--“Two and two are equal; this triangle and that are equal; this
length and that length are equal; this weight and that weight are
equal.”
He is dealing with mere ciphers, symbols or abstractions, and
consequently the mathematician has everything his own way, and so long
as he abides by ciphers, symbols and abstractions we have no wish
to interfere. He can carry his egalitarian principle right through
the English weights and measures, _viâ_ the decimal system, into
geometry. He is speaking of pure abstractions, arbitrarily supposed
to be identical, and if it amuses him to postulate equality as their
characteristic, nobody cares. They are his abstractions, his ciphers,
he can postulate what he likes about them. We have the feeling that it
does not matter. It is only when the mathematician, who, as a rule, is
a hopeless psychologist, begins to apply [p63] the lifeless notions
he has learnt in his study, to the world of activity and reality;
it is only when he begins to speak of things that are not his own
abstractions--things that really have an existence known to us--that we
immediately begin to feel that he is taking liberties with reality.
For instance, if he say that a certain 2,000 pear leaves are equal to
another 2,000 pear leaves, we who know that no two leaves have ever
been known to be exactly the same, straightway call him to order and
say: “No, sir, abide by your abstractions! That statement of yours is
not true.” Likewise, if he say that a certain 2,000 cows are equal
to another 2,000 cows, we feel that he is either taking too much
for granted, or else that he should try to enlist our confidence by
specifying the precise weight and individual qualities of each cow in
each set, before inviting us to acquiesce in his assertion. And even if
the two sets of 2,000 cows weighed exactly the same amount and were of
the same race, we should still feel that there were differences in the
quality and supply of milk in each set, as also in the vitality of the
respective cows in each set, etc., which ought to be taken into account
and which it would hardly be possible to estimate with perfect accuracy.
But let us think of things which have less individual divergence
from the common type. Let us think of screws, bolts, plates, chain
links, etc. After these have been made with the utmost care by means
of machines capable of almost mathematical precision, and when once
they have been accurately weighed and found equal both [p64] as
regards size and ponderability, you would think that you had groups of
things or individual things as between which you would be justified
in postulating the attribute equality. But if you should ask anyone
accustomed to dealing with such things, he would tell you that one bolt
in ten or in twenty usually splits, that one screw in a hundred or in
a thousand usually strips, and that one plate in fifty usually cracks.
Thus here and there, even when enormous pains have been taken to attain
uniformity, marked differences become apparent. What about those
differences that are not sufficiently marked to be noticeable until
some considerable time has elapsed?
Can equality be postulated of no two objects on earth then?
Provided that the mathematical abstracts, or arbitrary identities,
size, weight, bulk and number, alone, are in question, equality can be
postulated; but the moment mathematical abstractions are departed from,
it is not only unsafe, it is positively dishonest to speak of equality.
For instance, you can say that these hundred rails are equal to
those hundred rails in number, in weight, or in length. You could
not say that these hundred rails are equal to those hundred rails
in durability, resilience, or frangibility. You might say they are
approximately equal in these attributes, or as nearly as possible
equal; but apart from the arbitrary identities or abstractions of the
mathematicians, you could not postulate perfect equality.
Does the term “Equality” mean anything at all apart from these
mathematical [p65] abstractions then?----Absolutely nothing!
What, then, are those people who earnestly and warmly claim and
advocate equality among men--_men_ who are so different in their
ancestry, size, shape, endowments, beauty, desires, appetites, and
spirit, whose very features proclaim their inequality as they approach
us?
Are such clamourers for equality all liars?
They are certainly liars, but the majority of them are probably
perfectly unconscious liars. From childhood onwards they may have heard
the word “Equality” pronounced as if it implied a very certain reality,
a very much coveted desideratum. Deep emotions over which they have
no control, and concerning which they have even less understanding,
are therefore stirred every time they hear the word, or see it written
or printed; and thus they live and die earnestly believing that this
meaningless principle “Equality,” if it could be realised, would be an
unqualified boon.
How the equality is to be achieved, whether by bleeding the too
sanguine, truncating the too tall, deliberately debilitating the too
healthy, delicately injuring the brains of the too intelligent, or
systematically fattening the too thin, nobody troubles definitely to
specify. Egalitarians have a vague notion concerning a still more
vague desideratum, and this, coupled with the word “Equality,” that is
utterly meaningless outside the abstractions of the mathematicians,
completes the content of their hallucination.
But, it may be objected, the world is surely not so foolish. What men
mean [p66] when they demand equality, is equality before the law--that
is to say, that the law-officers should regard them, for the purposes
of law-administration as equal to one another in their chances of being
right.
This may be true of a few cases in which the cry “Equality” is set up;
but is it true of all? Do all egalitarians court equality because at
some time or another they may have to confront the officers of the law?
No, says the objector, but the law is not merely felt when two
litigants face each other, or when a criminal is apprehended; it is
felt in the home of the just as well as in that of the unjust; it is
felt in the life of the city, in the village and in the factory.
But it is precisely in such circumstances that the law would be most
harsh, if it assumed equality. It is compelled to assume inequality in
legislating for large communities, otherwise it could not be just at
all.
The very symbol of justice--a blindfold female with a pair of scales in
one hand--is a mathematical symbol, which can have no relation to human
affairs, but only to the mathematical abstraction, weight.
“A good law should be good for all men,” said Condorcet, “even as a
proposition is true for all men.”
“The capital error of the whole French Revolution,” says Louis Madelin,
“lies in the dogma thus proclaimed by Condorcet.”[11]
Yes, but Condorcet was not a political thinker, he was one of the
foremost mathematicians of his time! And Thomas Jefferson, whose words
head this chapter, was his disciple.
The danger to which the mathematician, like the engineer exposes us,
begins when he pretends to apply his principles to human affairs.
But, continues the objector, although it is admitted that initial
equality, as between human beings, or any living things for that
matter, is an impossibility, seeing that nature’s products are all
diverse and unequal; and although subsequent equality is hard to
achieve without behaving unjustly and barbarously to all those who
depart from a certain norm or standard--that is to say, without
bleeding, debilitating, truncating, or otherwise injuring all those who
vary from an arbitrarily selected pattern--there surely can be such a
thing as Equality of Opportunity.
At this point in the discussion it is only fair to say that most
opponents of Egalitarianism promptly capitulate, and eagerly concede
that equality of opportunity is a genuine desideratum capable of
practical realisation.
At the risk of appearing captious and sophistical, however, it can
no more be admitted here that Equality of Opportunity has any actual
possibilities of realisation than has the principle of equality itself.
It is, in fact, an illusion rather more complex and more serious than
the latter. For it presupposes, not only equality among men, but
equality of opportunity--two equalities instead of one--and among a
class [p68] of things which can be made equal only by a miracle.
In the first place, it may be assumed, without any further discussion,
that a moment’s calm reflection is enough to dispel even from the
meanest intelligence, the illusion that men can ever be equal.
On this score, alone, then, opportunities cannot be equal, because,
however accurately their equality may be established, in regard to a
supposed standard man, the moment they are placed in relation to the
multitude of unequal men, they, too, become unequal. For an opportunity
is not a thing in itself; it only becomes something in relation to the
creature who seizes it. Given an equal means of access to a particular
ridge or hill-top, the opportunity to reach that hill-top or ridge, is
the equal means of access _plus_ the kind of creature to whom it is
afforded. The introduction of an unequal element on the one hand--the
men--makes the other element, the means of access, not unequal as means
of access in the abstract, but unequal as opportunity in the concrete.
Suppose as much inequality between three men as exists between a hen, a
hare, and a hippopotamus--and as regards fleetness and swimming power
such inequality is not unusual between men--how could you devise equal
opportunities which would enable all three men to reach a certain
objective at the same moment of time, if a strip of water, a high wall,
and a ravine stood between the starting point and the objective?
You might do it by first holding a rehearsal, in which you would
accurately time [p69] each man and note his abilities, and then
handicap the fleetest accordingly.
But unfortunately life cannot be rehearsed, a life-handicap cannot be
calculated. Besides, it is to the advantage of society not to handicap
her fleetest and her best. As Lord Morley very rightly says: “The
well-being of the community demands the allotment of high function in
proportion to high faculty.”[12]
But suppose our objector replies: Very well, but that is all we ask. We
do not demand a handicap; we simply demand an equal means of access to
a particular objective, no matter whether ultimately those means prove
unequal or not, owing to the inequality of the men to whom they are
open.
It may then be asked whether even this equality in means of access
is not in itself utterly fanciful and fantastic. Given the radical
inequality of men at birth, together with the highly complex
arrangement of modern society, with its enormous variety of prizes,
it may reasonably be questioned whether it be even possible, not to
mention practicable.
A large number of people cannot all travel along the same narrow path.
Several narrow paths all exactly alike would have to be constructed.
The accidents, vicissitudes, fatalities that would attend some of the
early travellers along the roads--faintness, loss of luggage, sprains,
deaths, etc.--would either impede or facilitate the way of the later
travellers. Thus, in life, the means of access themselves, however
equal at the start, would quickly acquire unforeseen inequalities.
Let us select an example from life in England.
Two boys, A and B, one living at Whitstable, the other in London,
are quite unequal in gifts, ancestral tradition, build and tastes.
Nevertheless, it is desired to give them an equal opportunity, say, of
earning £1,000 a year when they are forty. The father of A wishes A to
have the same opportunities as B, and B’s father holds the same view
about B in his relation to A.
Very well, A, having learnt the art of oyster fishing, which is the
principal industry of Whitstable, is sent to London to learn to be a
clerk, and B is sent from London to Whitstable, after training as a
clerk, in order to have an opportunity of being an oyster fisherman.
Meanwhile, A’s father has heard that B is also studying agriculture
at a school of agriculture somewhere near Whitstable. A, after having
trained as a clerk, is therefore recalled to Whitstable and made to
undergo a course of agriculture, and B having acquired a knowledge of
oyster-fishing and agriculture, is sent back to London to learn French,
which A acquired there. Ultimately, however, A’s father, remembering
that a brother of his did extremely well as an engineer, prevails upon
B’s father to consent to the plan of sending both boys A and B to
Armstrong & Whitworth’s or to Vickers.
We can imagine both A’s father and B’s father dying long before A and
B had had every opportunity that society now offers [p71] to the
aspirant for success; we can also picture A and B themselves becoming
grey-haired octogenarians before they finally settled down.
No, says the objector. That is not what opportunity egalitarians mean.
They mean not that everybody should have an equal chance of succeeding
in all the careers that lie open, but that they should have an
opportunity of succeeding in life.
But what is meant by success here? Does it consist in becoming Prime
Minister of England, or Commander-in-Chief in India, or Lord Mayor,
or Editor of _John Bull_? In any case opportunities for becoming any
one of these four cannot be made equal. Perhaps success consists in
becoming a millionaire? But who is going to determine the equality of
opportunity for this achievement? Pullitzer, one of the most powerful
American millionaires of the first decade of this century, crawled
ashore in America as a penniless fugitive, after having swum from the
ship that had conveyed him as an emigrant from Europe!
Moreover, supposing that a boy’s opportunity-egalitarianism extends
beyond the shores of his native land, and he says: I wish to have the
same opportunity as the Frenchman, or the Canadian, or the Chinaman.
What then? Is there any valid reason why opportunity-egalitarianism
should be confined to a single country, or even to a single continent?
What, then, is left of this cry for equality of opportunity? Simply
the sting of resentment which gives rise to it; and this we shall now
proceed to examine. [p72]
What kind of person is it who clamours for this meaningless
desideratum, equality? Certainly not the beautiful person, because to
him equality, if it could be achieved, would result in bringing him
down to the common level. Neither can it be the person specially gifted
in any of the arts and sciences; for, again, equality, if it could by
some miracle be wrought, would amount to wiping out the advantage of
such special gifts. The self-reliant, the strong, the skilful, the able
and the desirable, in all walks of life, are never stirred by this cry
for equality; because they look down from their eminence, and cannot
therefore conceive that levelling could possibly prove an advantage.
It must therefore be the undesirable, the unskilful, the incompetent,
the ugly, the ungifted, in all walks of life, the incapable of all
classes, who want equality. And they want it because, looking up from
their position of chafing mediocrity and ungainliness, and beholding
their more gifted brethren, they realise that equality must redound
to their benefit. A moment’s reflection would tell them that it is an
impossible ideal; their mortified vanity, however, is stronger than
their reason, and urges them to believe in it, ridiculous as it may be.
“Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn,
Cries to weakest, as to strongest, ‘Ye are equals, equal-born.’”[13]
“What made the Revolution? Vanity! Liberty was nothing but a pretext!”
Thus spoke Napoleon, the greatest and probably the deepest man since
Cæsar.[14]
But, however fantastic the cry for equality may seem, it is a dangerous
cry, because it is still capable of stimulating and directing energy.
It is, therefore, still a weapon in the hands of the unscrupulous
agitator and demagogue.
It means nothing. We have seen that it has only a mathematical value.
But until the ignorant, the arrogant, and the revengeful among Nature’s
(not society’s)[15] failures are brave and honest enough to realise
that the apparent injustice of the radical inequality of man, is
irremediable and inevitable, until they realise that it cannot be
corrected without resorting to the most savage extreme of Procrustean
barbarity, the lie Equality, as a high explosive, as a generator of
social perturbations and upheavals, as a weapon and a war-cry, will
continue to give rise to meaningless hopes, and to suggest utterly
false claims to the overweening ambition of all discontented humanity.
There is, however, another factor in this clamour for the impracticable
ideal of equality, and that is our old friend the natural indolence
of the weary and the exhausted. If all were equal--no matter how this
equality is to be achieved--it is felt that things would be easier.
Not only would the shame of the ugly and the repulsive in the presence
of the beautiful and the gifted be spared, but the uphill race of the
poor runners beside the fleet and enduring runners, would also be
rendered less strenuous. The ineffective brain-cracking of the fools
beside the swift and efficient thought of the intelligent would be less
heart-rending, and so on.
Finally, the notion of Justice, of “immanent” Justice, constrains
those who hold it, to assume a scheme of life, according to which all
human beings are at least equal at birth. Such people very easily
argue as follows: If all human beings were not equal at birth, it
would not be just, “immanent” Justice would be caught red-handed in
an act of flagrant injustice at the very portals of life. But this
is inconceivable, therefore all must be born equal. We have seen,
however, that this notion of justice is quite as mythical as the idea
of equality itself.
Generated in this way, by innumerable powerful wishes, the idea of
equality begins to take shape and assume the appearance of a realisable
object in the minds of the weary and the exhausted; and without
troubling to ask themselves what the merits or possibilities of their
idea may be, they are prepared to advocate it, applaud it--aye [p75]
and even fight for it, at the cost of all the rest of the world--so
long as they continue to be assured by unscrupulous people that it will
effect all they want it to effect.
So far, then, it has been impossible to trace any substantial
measure of reality behind this notion and this cry of equality. Is
it conceivable that a word should give rise to such intense feeling
and yet bear no relation whatever to practical life? Was President
Jefferson raving when he, following the lead of almost thirty millions
of French people, also spoke of equality as a desideratum that could
be gravely and confidently placed on a political programme? For it
seems only fair to presume that he could not have been serious when he
maintained that all men were created equal.
It is possible that at the end of the 18th century equality as a cry
had a very definite meaning. It probably meant in its best and most
rational interpretation, that every citizen had an equal right to
have his interests safeguarded by the laws of his society, that is
to say, by the government of his country. This was not recognised as
a principle by the rulers of France before the Revolution, and it is
at least conceivable that the substantial reality behind this cry for
equality was precisely the demand on the part of all that each man’s
interests should be protected with equal vigour and conscientiousness
by the state.
But in this sense has the cry for equality any meaning?
In so far as certain sections of the community may still believe that
their interest is not so perfectly safeguarded as that of [p76] other
sections, the cry for equality of treatment has as much meaning to-day
as it had in the last years of the 18th century, but beyond this one
claim, it is difficult to discover any meaning in it whatsoever.
Unfortunately, however, this very necessary and incontrovertible
limitation of the idea of equality, is not likely to deter those whose
base purpose may best be served by extending the significance of the
word beyond its proper bounds, when appealing to the least desirable
elements in every nation; and unless in the mass of the people of all
countries there is that understanding of the term which alone bears
any resemblance to reality, mankind will continue at intervals to be
incited to energetic though fruitless violence in the pursuit of a
phantom which can have no practical or effective existence outside the
calculations of a mathematician’s brain.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 10: Perhaps it is only fair to remind the reader that
Jefferson was the United States minister plenipotentiary in Paris in
1785, and that he had, therefore, imbibed deeply much of the nonsense
that was current in France at the time.]
[Footnote 11: See _The French Revolution_, by Louis Madelin, p. 15. The
author continues: “He [Condorcet] and his co-religionists, who knew
nothing of true sociology, which has its foundations in psychology,
here prove themselves still more ignorant of history.”]
[Footnote 12: Rousseau. Vol. I., p. 181.]
[Footnote 13: See Tennyson, _Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After_.]
[Footnote 14: See also H. de Balzac. _Le Cabinet des Antiques_: “En
France, ce qu’il y a de plus national, est la vanité. La masse des
vanités blessées y a donné soif d’égalité.”]
[Footnote 15: Nature’s failures and society’s failures are not
identical. Nature’s failure is frequently a creature below par, he
is frequently botched and undesirable. Society’s failure may be an
extremely desirable person, to whom modern conditions are so loathsome
that he cannot adapt himself to them and become successful. That
is why the Eugenists, who are prone to class the unsuccessful of
the age with the undesirable, still have a good deal to learn. The
unsuccessful now-a-days are certainly the biologically “unfit”; but
the question that must be decided before you conclude that they are
also “undesirable” is whether present conditions demand desirable or
undesirable qualities in those who become successfully adapted to
them,--in those, that is to say, who are “fit.”]
[p77] CHAPTER IV
FREEDOM
“Freedom such as God hath given
Unto all beneath His heaven,
With their breath, and from their birth,
Though guilt would sweep it from the earth.”
--Byron (_Poems on Napoleon_).
“Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”--This meaningless,
but highly inflammatory statement of Rousseau’s is probably at the root
of most of the misunderstanding that prevails to-day in regard to the
subject of liberty. Just as people eagerly accept, without a moment’s
thought, the lie that men are born equal, so they are only too ready to
embrace a doctrine according to which they may lay claim to a sort of
primitive, or natural freedom, which has been stolen from them by their
rulers, their civilisation, or by invading hordes.
On examination, of course, the proposition “men are born free” proves
to be wholly and wildly fantastic.
Freedom implies, one would suppose, the right, the capacity, and the
opportunity to choose one course from another, one kind of life from
another. But how much can a man really choose?
At birth, for instance, all kinds of conditions are imposed upon the
future adult--conditions which are bound to determine the whole of the
principal events of his or her [p78] career,--over which there is no
possibility of control whatsoever.
It may be assumed, for instance, that a baby might like to choose its
nationality and the language that it will speak in later life. Can it
do so? It may reasonably be taken for granted that a baby might like to
choose its parents, its brothers and sisters, and its other relatives.
Can it do so? Its very constitution and health are dependent upon the
kind of mother and father it has; its very happiness and success as an
adult may depend upon the way in which it is treated as an infant. Has
it any choice, any freedom, in regard to any of these matters?
It is not fanciful to suspect that the baby might like to choose
its particular form and features, its ultimate height as an adult,
etc., etc. The most vital and important issues will hang upon this
question of its face and form when it is grown up. But it has no power
whatsoever to determine any one of these most vital and important
conditions.
An imaginative baby, realising the inexorable fate which hangs over
certain gifts, certain endowments, and a particular sex, might regard
it as all important to be able to select these freely.
But the rigidity of natural law, the impossibility of controlling any
of these matters, ordain that at birth a baby has all its important
ultimate characteristics, and therefore all its proclivities, tastes,
vices, virtues, and even aspirations settled for it. Its nationality,
its language, its parents, its other relatives, its constitution, its
degree of beauty, its stature, its physical and mental endowments, its
sex,--all these things, upon which the [p79] figure it will ultimately
cut in the world most surely depend,--are fixed by an iron necessity
which allows of no choice, no preference,--aye, and scarcely any
modification either.
If this is freedom, then what does constraint, what does oppression
mean?
It may be objected that this is not what Rousseau meant; that Rousseau
maintained that man was born free, because in a savage state he
would really be free from the conventions, laws, and constraints of
civilisation.
This appears convincing enough. The savage is certainly free from the
laws and constraints of civilisation, but the savage race has yet to be
found that is free from all conventions, laws and constraints, nor is
it by any means certain that these obstacles to freedom are the more
pleasant for being barbarous instead of civilised.
But even if we suppose that Rousseau’s alleged freedom of babies is a
reality, at what point, it may be asked, is it exchanged for bondage?
Most people would reply: when the child goes to school. It is at school
that the shackles of civilisation are first fastened on the free
infant’s wrists. It is the work that civilisation ultimately holds in
store for the child that necessitates his being trained and “educated.”
To this the naturalist and anthropologist might reply: is there now,
or has there ever been, a race of men or animals that did not have to
undergo some process of training in childhood in order to learn to be
efficient adults? [p80]
Of course there neither is, nor ever was any such race.
Iron necessity again precludes the possibility of this alleged freedom
even in childhood.
In manhood, again, freedom is purely a will-o’-the-wisp. No man
who wishes to continue living is free. He is bound to procure food
and clothing for himself even in the cannibal islands. If he have
passions, he is bound to find some means of gratifying them. This
means shouldering responsibilities; for no community, even of animals,
undertakes to rear the fruits of other people’s passions. He cannot
even select his calling, for his calling will depend upon his special
aptitudes. In fact, the more gifted he is, and the more marked his
capabilities, the less will he be able to choose how to earn a living.
Only a man of mediocre and insignificant gifts is really free to choose
his calling, because he feels no irresistible impulse in a given
direction. But these mediocre people who are free to choose their
calling, don’t really choose a “calling” at all--the very idea of
choosing something to which one is called is absurd--what they choose
is a more or less characterless and humdrum means of earning a living,
which requires neither very special gifts nor any marked proclivities.
To be free to choose what one will be, is always a sign of hopelessly
humble tastes and endowments.
Putting it at its lowest, however, we might concede the point that
_as far as choosing a means of livelihood is concerned_, there are a
certain number of very mediocre men whose gifts are so indistinct and
feeble, and whose [p81] tastes are so wavering and undefined, that
they are “free.”[16]
Apart from these unhappy individuals, then, if Rousseauesque freedom
exist at all, it exists only between the hour of birth and the hour
when the child first goes to school. We have seen that even this is
untrue. But has it even a semblance of truth as a conclusion?
Surely nothing could be clearer than the fact that even in those years
freedom is as remote as ever; for quite apart from the reasons already
adduced above, it will easily be seen that the infant is as much the
victim of convention and form as any adult could possibly be. It has a
home, its life is subjected to rules, to a time-table, it cannot eat
or do what it likes, except within very well-defined limits severely
imposed.
“It can think what it likes,” somebody may object.
But even this is not strictly true. Its thoughts are as much
necessitated by its environment and its constitution as is its food.
If it is born in England or France, for instance, it will be brought
up to believe in “immanent justice,” in “equality,” in “freedom.” It
cannot escape these imbecilities. They are its fate. It will be taught
the inanity that “every man has a right to his own opinion,” and that
“Britons never never never shall be slaves,”--whatever that means, if
it means anything at all. Later in life it may claim the idea that
“every man has a right to his own opinion” as its own. It will have
forgotten how it could not help holding this idea, any more than it
could help learning the English language.
Rousseau then was talking nonsense when he said that men were born
free; but both his reading and his education were so pool that it is
doubtful whether he knew that he was talking nonsense.
Apart from Rousseauesque freedom, however, has the word no meaning?
It will be seen that, in the end, it has very little.
Voluntary actions, or actions that are performed as the result of a
free choice between two or more alternatives, are not known. They never
occur. Even when they appear to occur, they are generally, if not
always, associated with a weak or useless personality.
Strong natures have no choice; they have no alternative; they have
therefore no freedom. They are driven to their deeds by an iron
necessity. If they speak or write, it is out of the fulness of their
hearts. It is a phenomenon akin to the mechanical overflow of a
flooded basin. If they go in search of big undertakings and of vast
responsibilities, in order to shoulder them, it is because they have a
store of accumulated energy which must discharge itself over a large
area, over a large mass of material.
When Napoleon took leave of his comrades in Egypt, before embarking on
that gigantic enterprise, the reconstitution of anarchical bleeding and
devastated France, he said: “I am going to drive out the lawyers.”