DISTRIBUTISM
Before I go any further with this
sketch, I find I must pause upon a parenthesis touching the nature of my task,
without which the rest of it may be misunderstood. As a matter of fact, without
pretending to any official or commercial experience, I am here doing a great
deal more than has ever been asked of most of the mere men of letters (if I may
call myself for the moment a man of letters) when they confidently conducted social
movements or set up social ideals. I will promise that, by the end of these
notes, the reader shall know a great deal more about how men might set about
making a Distributive State than the readers of Carlyle ever knew about how
they should set about finding a Hero King or a Real Superior. I think we can
explain how to make a small shop or a small farm a common feature of our
society better than Matthew Arnold explained how to make the State the organ of
Our Best Self. I think the farm will be marked on some sort of rude map more
clearly than the Earthly Paradise on the navigation chart of William Morris;
and I think that in comparison with his News from Nowhere this might fairly be
called News from Somewhere. Rousseau and Ruskin were often much more vague and
visionary than I am; though Rousseau was even more rigid in abstractions, and
Ruskin was sometimes very much excited about particular details. I need not say
that I am not comparing myself to these great men; I am only pointing out that
even from these, whose minds dominated so much wider a field, and whose
position as publicists was much more respected and responsible, nothing was as
a matter of fact asked beyond the general principles we are accused of giving.
I am merely pointing out that the task has fallen to a very minor poet when
these very major prophets were not required to carry out and complete the
fulfilment of their own prophecies. It would seem that our fathers did not
think it quite so futile to have a clear vision of the goal with or without a
detailed map of the road; or to be able to describe a scandal without going on
to describe a substitute. Anyhow, for whatever reason, it is quite certain that
if I really were great enough to deserve the reproaches of the utilitarians, if
I really were as merely idealistic or imaginative as they make me out, if I
really did confine myself to describing a direction without exactly measuring a
road, to pointing towards home or heaven and telling men to use their own good
sense in getting there if this were really all that I could do, it would be all
that men immeasurably greater than I am were ever expected to do; from Plato
and Isaiah to Emerson and Tolstoy.
But it is not all that I can do;
even though those who did not do it did so much more. I can do something else
as well; but I can only do it if it be understood what I am doing. At the same
time I am well aware that, in explaining the improvement of so elaborate a
society, a man may often find it very difficult to explain exactly what he is doing,
until it is done. I have considered and rejected half a dozen ways of
approaching the problem, by different roads that all lead to the same truth. I
had thought of beginning with the simple example of the peasant; and then I
knew that a hundred correspondents would leap upon me, accusing me of trying to
turn all of them into peasants. I thought of beginning with describing a decent
Distributive State in being, with all its balance of different things; just as
the Socialists describe their Utopia in being, with its concentration in one
thing. Then I knew a hundred correspondents would call me Utopian; and say it
was obvious my scheme could not work, because I could only describe it when it
was working. But what they would really mean by my being Utopian, would be
this: that until that scheme was working, there was no work to be done. I have
finally decided to approach the social solution in this fashion: to point out
first that the monopolist momentum is not irresistible; that even here and now
much could be done to modify it, much by anybody, almost everything by
everybody. Then I would maintain that on the removal of that particular
plutocratic pressure, the appetite and appreciation of natural property would
revive, like any other natural thing. Then, I say, it will be worth while to
propound to people thus returning to sanity, however sporadically, a sane
society that could balance property and control machinery. With the description
of that ultimate society, with its laws and limitations, I would conclude.
Now that may or may not be a good
arrangement or order of ideas; but it is an intelligible one; and I submit with
all humility that I have a right to arrange my explanations in that order, and
no critic has a right to complain that I do not disarrange them in order to
answer questions out of their order. I am willing to write him a whole
Encyclopedia of Distributism if he has the patience to read it; but he must
have the patience to read it. It is unreasonable for him to complain that I
have not dealt adequately with Zoology, State Provision For, under the letter
B; or described the honourable social status of the Guild of the Xylographers
while I am still dealing alphabetically with the Guild of Architects. I am
willing to be as much of a bore as Euclid; but the critic must not complain
that the forty-eighth proposition of the second book is not a part of the
<Pons Asinorum>. [Note: There is no 48th proposition in Book II of
Euclid. This is a trick question which would stump someone without even basic
training, but which is obvious to the initiate: that is the meaning of the
<pons asinorum>, which is "the proposition that the angles at the
base of an isosceles triangle are equal to each other". It is interesting
to know that the 48th proposition of the <first> book is the converse of
the 47th – the famous Pythagorean Theorem.] The ancient Guild of
Bridge-Builders will have to build many such bridges.
Now from comments that have come
my way, I gather that the suggestions I have already made may not altogether
explain their own place and purpose in this scheme. I am merely pointing out
that monopoly is not omnipotent even now and here; and that anybody could
think, on the spur of the moment, of many ways in which its final triumph can
be delayed and perhaps defeated. Suppose a monopolist who is my mortal enemy
endeavours to ruin me by preventing me from selling eggs to my neighbors, I can
tell him I shall live on my own turnips in my own kitchen-garden. I do not mean
to tie myself to turnips; or swear never to touch my own potatoes or beans. I
mean the turnips as an example: something to throw at him. Suppose the wicked
millionaire in question comes and grins over my garden wall and says, "I
perceive by your starved and emaciated appearance that you are in immediate
need of a few shillings; but you can't possibly get them," I may possibly
be stung into retorting, "Yes, I can. I could sell my first edition of
<Martin Chuzzlewit>." I do not necessarily mean that I see myself
already in a pauper's grave unless I can sell <Martin Chuzzlewit>; I do
not mean that I have nothing else to suggest except selling <Martin
Chuzzlewit>; I do not mean to brag like any common politician that I have
nailed my colours to the <Martin Chuzzlewit> policy. I mean to tell the
offensive pessimist that I am not at the end of my resources; that I can sell a
book or even, if the case grows desperate, write a book. I could do a great
many things before I came to definitely anti-social action like robbing a bank
or (worse still) working in a bank. I could do a great many things of a great
many kinds, and I give an example at the start to suggest that there are many
more of them, not that there are no more of them. There are a great many things
of a great many kinds in my house, besides the copy of <Martin
Chuzzlewit>. Not many of them are of great value except to me; but some of
them are of some value to anybody. For the whole point of a home is that it is
a hotch-potch. And mine, at any rate, rises to that austere domestic ideal. The
whole point of one's own house is that it is not only a number of totally
different things, which are nevertheless one thing, but it is one in which we
still value even the things that we forget. If a man has burnt my house to a
heap of ashes, I am none the less justly indignant with him for having burnt
everything, because I cannot at first even remember everything he has burnt.
And as it is with the household gods, so it is with the whole of that household
religion, or what remains of it, to offer resistance to the destructive
discipline of industrial capitalism. In a simpler society, I should rush out of
the ruins, calling for help on the Commune or the King, and crying out,
"Haro! a robber has burnt my house." I might, of course, rush down
the street crying in one passionate breath, "Haro! a robber has burnt my
front door of seasoned oak with the usual fittings, fourteen window frames,
nine curtains, five and a half carpets, 753 books, of which four were
<editions de luxe>, one portrait of my great-grandmother," and so on
through all the items; but something would be lost of the fierce and simple
feudal cry. And in the same way I could have begun this outline with an
inventory of all the alterations I should like to see in the laws, with the
object of establishing some economic justice in England. But I doubt whether
the reader would have had any better idea of what I was ultimately driving at;
and it would not have been the approach by which I propose at present to drive.
I shall have occasion later to go into some slight detail about these things;
but the cases I give are merely illustrations of my first general thesis: that
we are not even at the moment doing everything that could be done to resist the
rush of monopoly; and that when people talk as if nothing could now be done,
that statement is false at the start; and that all sorts of answers to it will
immediately occur to the mind.
Capitalism is breaking up; and in
one sense we do not pretend to be sorry it is breaking up. Indeed, we might put
our own point pretty correctly by saying that we would help it to break up; but
we do not want it merely to break down. But the first fact to realize is
precisely that; that it is a choice between its breaking up and its breaking
down. It is a choice between its being voluntarily resolved into its real
component parts, each taking back its own, and its merely collapsing on our
heads in a crash or confusion of all its component parts, which some call
communism and some call chaos. The former is the one thing all sensible people
should try to procure. The latter is the one thing that all sensible people
should try to prevent. That is why they are often classed together.
I have mainly confined myself to
answering what I have always found to be the first question, "What are we
to do now?" To that I answer, "What we must do now is to stop the
other people from doing what they are doing now." The initiative is with
the enemy. It is he who is already doing things, and will have done them long
before we can begin to do anything, since he has the money, the machinery, the
rather mechanical majority, and other things which we have first to gain and
then to use. He has nearly completed a monopolist conquest, but not quite; and
he can still be hampered and halted. The world has woken up very late, but that
is not our fault. That is the fault of all the fools who told us for twenty
years that there could never be any Trusts; and are now telling us, equally
wisely, that there can never be anything else.
There are other things I ask the reader
to bear in mind. The first is that this outline is only an outline, though one
that can hardly avoid some curves and loops. I do not profess to dispose of all
the obstacles that might arise in this question, because so many of them would
seem to many to be quite a different question. I will give one example of what
I mean. What would the critical reader have thought, if at the very beginning
of this sketch I had gone off into a long disputation about the Law of Libel?
Yet, if I were strictly practical, I should find that one of the most practical
obstacles. It is the present ridiculous position that monopoly is not resisted
as a social force but can still be resented as a legal imputation. If you try
to stop a man cornering milk, the first thing that happens will be a smashing
libel action for calling it a corner. It is manifestly mere common sense that
if the thing is not a sin it is not a slander. As things stand, there is no
punishment for the man who does it; but there is a punishment for the man who
discovers it. I do not deal here (though I am quite prepared to deal elsewhere)
with all these detailed difficulties which a society as now constituted would
raise against such a society as we want to constitute. If it were constituted
on the principles I suggest, those details would be dealt with on those
principles as they arose. For instance, it would put an end to the nonsense
whereby men, who are more powerful than emperors, pretend to be private
tradesmen suffering from private malice; it will assert that those who are in
practice public men must be criticized as potential public evils. It would
destroy the absurdity by which an "important case" is tried by a
"special jury"; or, in other words, that any serious issue between
rich and poor is tried by the rich. But the reader will see that I cannot here
rule out all the ten thousand things that might trip us up; I must assume that
a people ready to take the larger risks would also take the smaller ones.
Now this outline is an outline; in
other words, it is a design, and anybody who thinks we can have practical
things without theoretical designs can go and quarrel with the nearest engineer
or architect for drawing thin lines on thin paper. But there is another and
more special sense in which my suggestion is an outline; in the sense that it
is deliberately drawn as a large limitation within which there are many
varieties. I have long been acquainted, and not a little amused, with the sort
of practical man who will certainly say that I generalize because there is no
practical plan. The truth is that I generalize because there are so many
practical plans. I myself know four or five schemes that have been drawn up,
more or less drastically, for the diffusion of capital. The most cautious, from
a capitalist standpoint, is the gradual extension of profit-sharing. A more
stringently democratic form of the same thing is the management of every
business (if it <cannot> be a small business) by a guild or group
clubbing their contributions and dividing their results. Some Distributists
dislike the idea of the workman having shares only where he has work; they
think he would be more independent if his little capital were invested
elsewhere; but they all agree that he ought to have the capital to invest.
Others continue to call themselves Distibutists because they would give every
citizen a dividend out of much larger national systems of production. I
deliberately draw out my general principles so as to cover as many as possible
of these alternative business schemes. But I object to being told that I am
covering so many because I know there are none. If I tell a man he is too
luxurious and extravagant, and that he ought to economize in something, I am
not bound to give him a list of his luxuries. The point is that he will be all
the better for cutting down any of his luxuries. And my point is that modern
society would be all the better for cutting up property by any of these
processes. This does not mean that I have not my own favourite form; personally
I prefer the second type of division given in the above list of examples. But
my main business is to point out that any reversal of the rush to concentrate
property will be an improvement on the present state of things. If I
tell a man his house is burning
down in Putney, he may thank me even if I do not give him a list of all the
vehicles which go to Putney, with the numbers of all the taxicabs and the
time-table of all the trams. It is enough that I know there are a great many
vehicles for him to choose from, before he is reduced to the proverbial
adventure of going to Putney on a pig. It is enough that any one of those
vehicles is on the whole less uncomfortable than a house on fire or even a heap
of ashes. I admit I might be called unpractical if impenetrable forests and destructive
floods lay between here and Putney; it might then be as merely idealistic to
praise Putney as to praise Paradise. But I do not admit that I am unpractical
because I know there are half a dozen practical ways which are more practical
than the present state of things. But it does not follow, in fact, that I do
not know how to get to Putney. Here, for instance, are half a dozen things
which would help the process of Distributism, apart from those on which I shall
have occasion to touch as points of principle. Not all Distributists would
agree with all of them; but all would agree that they are in the direction of
Distributism. (1) The taxation of contracts so as to discourage the sale of
small property to big proprietors and encourage the break-up of big property
among small proprietors. (2) Something like the Napoleonic testamentary law and
the destruction of primogeniture. (3) The establishment of free law for the
poor, so that small property could always be defended against great. (4) The
deliberate protection of certain experiments in small property, if necessary by
tariffs and even local tariffs. (5) Subsidies to foster the starting of such
experiments. (6) A league of voluntary dedication, and any number of other
things of the same kind. But I have inserted this chapter here in order to
explain that this is a sketch of the first principles of Distributism and not
of the last details, about which even Distributists might dispute. In such a
statement, examples are given as examples, and not as exact and exhaustive
lists of all the cases covered by the rule. If this elementary principle of
exposition be not understood, I must be content to be called an unpractical
person by that sort of practical man. And indeed in his sense there is
something in his accusation. Whether or no I am a practical man, I am not what
is called a practical politician, which means a professional politician. I can
claim no part in the glory of having brought our country to its present
promising and hopeful condition. Harder heads than mine have established the
present prosperity of coal. Men of action, of a more rugged energy, have
brought us to the comfortable condition of living on our capital. I have had no
part in the great industrial revolution which has increased the beauties of
nature and reconciled the classes of society; nor must the too enthusiastic
reader think of thanking me for this more enlightened England, in which the
employee is living on a dole from the State and the employer on an overdraft at
the Bank.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Our age is obviously the Nonsense
Age; the wiser sort of nonsense being provided for the children and the sillier
sort of nonsense for the grown-up people. The eighteenth century has been
called the Age of Reason; I suppose there is no doubt that the twentieth
century is the Age of Unreason. But even that is an understatement. The Age of
Reason was nicknamed from a famous rationalist book. [Thomas Paine's <The
Age of Reason> 1794- 95.] But the rationalist was not really so much
concerned to urge the rational against the irrational; but rather specially to
urge the natural against the supernatural. But there is a degree of the
unreasonable that would go even beyond the unnatural. It is not merely an
incredible tale, but an inconsistent idea. As I pointed out to somebody long
ago, it is one thing to believe that a beanstalk scaled the sky, and quite another
to believe that fifty-seven beans make five.
For instance, a man may disbelieve
in miracles; normally on some <a priori> principle of determinist
thought; in some cases even on examination of the evidence. But on being told
of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, he is told
something that is logical if it is not natural. He is not told that there were
fewer fishes because the fishes had been multiplied. Multiplication is still a
mathematical term; and a mob all feeding on miraculous fishes is a less
mysterious or monstrous sight than a man saying that multiplication is the same
as subtraction. Such a story, for such a sceptic, does not carry conviction;
but it does make sense. He can recognise the logical consequence, if he cannot
understand the logical cause. But no pope or priest ever asked him to believe
that thousands died of starvation in the desert because they were loaded with
loaves and fishes. No creed or dogma ever declared that there was too little
food because there was too much fish. But that is the precise, practical and
prosaic definition of the present situation in the modern science of economics.
And the man of the Nonsense Age must bow his head and repeat his <credo>,
the motto of his time, <Credo quia impossible>. ["I believe because
it is impossible."]
Or again, the term unreason is
sometimes used rather more reasonably; for a sort of loose or elliptical
statement, which is at least illogical in form. The most popular case is what
was called the Irish Bull; often suspected of resembling the Papal Bull, in
being a supernatural monster bred of credulity and superstition. But even this
old sort of confusion stopped short of the new sort of contradiction. If any
Irishman really does say, "We are not birds, to be in two places at
once," at least we know what he means, even if it is not what he says. But
suppose he says that one bird has been miraculously multiplied into a million
birds, and that in consequence there are fewer birds in the world than there
were before. We should then be dealing, not merely with an Irish Bull but with
a Mad Bull, and concerned not with the incredible but with the
incomprehensible. Or, to apply the parable, the Irish have sometimes been
accused of unbalanced emotion or morbid sentiment. But nobody says that they
merely imagined the Great Famine, in which multitudes starved because the
potatoes were few and small. Only suppose an Irishman had said that they
starved because the potatoes were gigantic and innumerable. I think we should
not yet have heard the last of the wrong-headed absurdity of that Irishman. Yet
that is an exact description of the economic condition to-day as it affects the
Englishman. And, to a great extent, the American. We learn that there is a
famine because there is not a scarcity; and there is such a good potato-crop
that there are no potatoes. The Irishman, with his bull or his bird, is quite a
hard-headed realist and rationalist compared to that. Thus, the old examples of
the fantastic fell far short of the modern fact; whether they were mysteries
supposed to be above reason or merely muddles supposed to be below it. Their
miracles were more normal than our scientific averages; and the Irish blunder
was less illogical than the actual logic of events.
For it seems that we live to-day
in a world of witchcraft, in which the orchards wither because they prosper,
and the multitude of apples on the apple-tree of itself turns them into
forbidden fruit, and makes the effort to consume them in every sense fruitless.
This is the modern economic paradox, which is called Over-Production, or a glut
in the market, and though at first sight it sounds like the wildest fantasy, it
is well to realise in what sense it is the most solid of facts. Let it be
clearly understood, therefore, that as a description of the objective social
situation at this instant in this industrial society, the paradox is perfectly
true. But it is not really true that the contradiction in terms is true. If we
take it, not as a description but as a definition, if we take it as a matter of
abstract argument, then certainly the contradiction is untrue, as every
contradiction is untrue.
The truth is that a third element
has entered into the matter, which is not mentioned in this abstract statement
of it. That element might be stated in many ways; perhaps the shortest
statement of it is in the fable of the man who sold razors, and afterwards
explained to an indignant customer, with simple dignity, that he had never said
the razors would shave. When asked if razors were not made to shave, he replied
that they were made to sell. That is A Short History of Trade and Industry
During the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.
God made a world of reason as sure
as God made little apples (as the beautiful proverb goes); and God did not make
little apples larger than large apples. It is not true that a man whose
apple-tree is loaded with apples will suffer from a want of apples; though he
may indulge in a waste of apples. But if he never looks upon apples as things
to eat, but always looks on them as things to sell, he will really get into
another sort of complication; which may end in a sort of contradiction. If,
instead of producing as many apples as he wants, he produces as many apples as
he imagines the whole world wants, with the hope of capturing the trade of the
whole world - then he will be either successful or unsuccessful in competing
with the man next door who also wants the whole world's trade to himself.
Between them, they will produce so many apples that apples in the market will
be about as valuable as pebbles on the beach. Thus each of them will find he
has very little money in his pocket, with which to go and buy fresh pears at
the fruiterer's shop. If he had never expected to get fruit at the fruiterer's
shop, but had put up his hand and pulled them off his own tree, his difficulty
would never have arisen. It seems simple; but at the root of all apple-trees
and apple-growing, it is really as simple as that.
Of course I do not mean that the
practice is at present simple; for no practical problem is simple, least of all
at the present time, when everything is confused by the corrupt and evasive
muddlers who are called practical politicians. But the principle is simple; and
the only way to proceed through a complex situation is to start with the right
first principle. How far we can do without, or control, or merely modify the
disadvantages of buying and selling is quite another matter. But the
disadvantages do arise from buying and selling, and not from producing: not
even from over-producing. And it is some satisfaction to realise that we are
not living in a nightmare in which No is the same as Yes; that even the modern
world has not actually gone mad, with all its ingenious attempts to do so; that
two and two do in fact make four; and that the man who has four apples really
has more than the man who has three. For some modern metaphysicians and moral
philosophers seem disposed to leave us in doubt on these points. It is not the
fundamental reason in things that is at fault; it is a particular hitch or
falsification, arising from a very recent trick of regarding everything only in
relation to trade. Trade is all very well in its way, but Trade has been put in
the place of Truth. Trade, which is in its nature a secondary or dependent
thing, has been treated as a primary and independent thing; as an absolute. The
moderns, mad upon mere multiplication, have even made a plural out of what is
eternally singular, in the sense of single. They have taken what all ancient
philosophers called the Good, and translated it as the Goods.
I believe that certain mystics, in
the American business world, protested against the slump by pinning labels to
their coats inscribed, Trade Is Good," along with other similar
proclamations, such as, "Capone Is Dead," or "Cancer Is
Pleasant," or "Death Is Abolished," or any other hard realistic
truths for which they might find space upon their persons. But what interests
me about these magicians is that, having decided to call up ideal conditions by
means of spells and incantations to control the elements, they did not (so to
speak) understand the elements of the elements. They did not go to the root of
the matter, and imagine that their troubles had really come to an end. Rather
they worshipped the means instead of the end. While they were about it, they
ought to have said, not "Trade Is Good," but "Living Is
Good," or "Life Is Good." I suppose it would be too much to
expect such thoroughly respectable people to say, "God Is Good"; but
it is really true that their conception of what is good lacks the philosophical
finality that belonged to the goodness of God. When God looked on created
things and saw that they were good, it meant that they were good in themselves
and as they stood; but by the modern mercantile idea, God would only have
looked at them and seen that they were The Goods. In other words, there would
be a label tied to the tree or the hill, as to the hat of the Mad Hatter, with
"This Style, 10/6." All the flowers and birds would be ticketed with
their reduced prices; all the creation would be for sale or all the creatures
seeking employment; with all the morning stars making sky-signs together and
all the Sons of God shouting for jobs. In other words, these people are
incapable of imagining any good except that which comes from bartering
something for something else. The idea of a man enjoying a thing in itself, for
himself, is inconceivable to them. The notion of a man eating his own apples
off his own apple-tree seems like a fairy-tale. Yet the fall from that first
creation that was called good has very largely come from the restless
impatience for valuing things in themselves; the madness of the trader who
cannot see any good in a good, except as something to get rid of. It was once
admitted that with sin and death there entered the world something that we call
change. It is none the less true and tragic, because what we called change, we
called afterwards exchange. Anyhow, the result of that extravagance of exchange
has been that when there are too many apples there are too few apple-eaters. I
do not insist on the symbol of Eden, or the parable of the apple-tree, but it
is odd to notice that even that accidental image pursues us at every stage of
this strange story. The last result of treating a tree as a shop or a store
instead of as a store-room, the last effect of treating apples as goods rather
than as good, has been in a desperate drive of public charity and in poor men
selling apples in the street.
In all normal civilisations the
trader existed and must exist. But in all normal civilisations the trader was
the exception; certainly he was never the rule; and most certainly he was never
the ruler. The predominance which he has gained in the modern world is the
cause of all the disasters of the modern world. The universal habit of humanity
has been to produce and consume as part of the same process; largely conducted
by the same people in the same place. Sometimes goods were produced and
consumed on the same great feudal manor; sometimes even on the same small
peasant farm. Sometimes there was a tribute from serfs as yet hardly
distinguishable from slaves; sometimes there was a co-operation between
free-men which the superficial can hardly distinguish from communism. But none
of these many historical methods, whatever their vices or limitations, was
strangled in the particular tangle of our own time; because most of the people,
for most of the time, were thinking about growing food and then eating it; not
entirely about growing food and selling it at the stiffest price to somebody
who had nothing to eat. And I for one do not believe that there is any way out
of the modern tangle, except to increase the proportion of the people who are
living according to the ancient simplicity. Nobody in his five wits proposes
that there should be no trade and no traders. Nevertheless, it is important to
remember, as a matter of mere logic, that there might conceivably be great
wealth, even if there were no trade and no traders. It is important for the
sort of man whose only hope is that Trade Is Good or whose only secret terror
is that Trade Is Bad. In principle, prosperity might be very great, even if
trade were very bad. If a village were so fortunately situated that, for some
reason, it was easy for every family to keep its own chickens, to grow its own
vegetables, to milk its own cow and (I will add) to brew its own beer, the
standard of life and property might be very high indeed, even though the long
memory of the Oldest Inhabitant only recorded two or three pure transactions of
trade; if he could only recall the one far-off event of his neighbour buying a
new hat from a gipsy's barrow; or the singular incident of Farmer Billings
purchasing an umbrella.
As I have said, I do not imagine,
or desire, that things would ever be quite so simple as that. But we must
understand things in their simplicity before we can explain or correct their
complexity. The complexity of commercial society has become intolerable,
because that society is commercial and nothing else. The whole mind of the
community is occupied, not with the idea of possessing things, but with the
idea of passing them on. When the simple enthusiasts already mentioned say that
Trade is Good, they mean that all the people who possess goods are perpetually
parting with them. These Optimists presumably invoke the poet, with some slight
emendation of the poet's meaning, when he cries aloud, 'Our souls are love and
a perpetual farewell.' In that sense, our individualistic and commercial modern
society is actually the very reverse of a society founded on Private Property.
I mean that the actual direct and isolated enjoyment of private property, as
distinct from the excitement of exchanging it or getting a profit on it, is
rather rarer than in many simple communities that seem almost communal in their
simplicity. In the case of this sort of private consumption, which is also
private production, it is very unlikely that it will run continually into
overproduction. There is a limit to the number of apples a man can eat, and
there will probably be a limit, drawn by his rich and healthy hatred of work,
to the number of apples which he will produce but cannot eat. But there is no
limit to the number of apples he may possibly sell; and he soon becomes a
pushing, dexterous and successful Salesman and turns the whole world
upside-down. For it is he who produces this huge pantomimic paradox with which
this rambling reflection began. It is he who makes a wilder revolution than the
apple of Adam which was the loosening of death, or the apple of Newton which
was the apocalypse of gravitation, by proclaiming the supreme blasphemy and
heresy, that the apple was made for the market and not for the mouth. It was
he, by starting the wild race of pouring endless apples into a bottomless
market, who opened the abyss of irony and contradiction into which we are
staring to-day. That trick of treating the trade as the test, and the only
test, has left us face to face with a piece of stark staring nonsense written
in gigantic letters across the world; more gigantic than all its own absurd
advertisements and announcements; the statement that the more we produce the
less we possess.
Oscar Wilde would probably have
fainted with equal promptitude, if told he was being used in an argument about
American salesmanship, or in defence of a thrifty and respectable family life
on the farm. But it does so happen that one true epigram, among many of his
false epigrams, sums up correctly and compactly a certain truth, not (I am
happy to say) about Art, but about all that he desired to separate from Art;
ethics and even economics. He said in one of his plays: "A cynic is a man
who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." [The
quotation is from <Lady Windermere's Fan> (1892).] It is extraordinarily
true; and the answer to most other things that he said. But it is yet more
extraordinary that the modern men who make that mistake most obviously are not
the cynics. On the contrary, they are those who call themselves the Optimists;
perhaps even those who would call themselves the Idealists; certainly those who
regard themselves as the Regular Guys and the Sons of Service and Uplift. It is
too often those very people who have spoilt all their good effect, and weakened
their considerable good example in work and social contact, by that very error:
that things are to be judged by the price and not by the value. And since Price
is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and
indestructible thing, they have swept us into a society which is no longer
solid but fluid, as unfathomable as a sea and as treacherous as a quicksand.
Whether anything more solid can be
built again upon a social philosophy of values, there is now no space to
discuss at length here; but I am certain that nothing solid can be built on any
other philosophy; certainly not upon the utterly unphilosophical philosophy of
blind buying and selling; of bullying people into purchasing what they do not
want; of making it badly so that they may break it and imagine they want it again;
of keeping rubbish in rapid circulation like a dust-storm in a desert; and
pretending that you are teaching men to hope, because you do not leave them one
intelligent instant in which to despair.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
In the dull, dusty, stale,
stiff-jointed and lumbering language, to which most modern discussion is
limited, it is necessary to say that there is at this moment the same
fashionable fallacy about Sex and about Property. In the older and freer
language, in which men could both speak and sing, it is truer to say that the
same evil spirit has blasted the two great powers that make the poetry of life;
the Love of Woman and the Love of the Land. It is important to observe, to
start with, that the two things were closely connected so long as humanity was
human, even when it was heathen. Nay, they were still closely connected, even
when it was a decadent heathenism. But even the stink of decaying heathenism
has not been so bad as the stink of decaying Christianity. The corruption of
the best. . . .
For instance, there were
throughout antiquity, both in its first stage and its last, modes of idolatry
and imagery of which Christian men can hardly speak. "Let them not be so
much as named among you." [See Ephesians 5:3] Men wallowed in the mere
sexuality of a mythology of sex; they organised prostitution like priesthood,
for the service of their temples; they made pornography their only poetry; they
paraded emblems that turned even architecture into a sort of cold and colossal
exhibitionism. Many learned books have been written of all these phallic cults;
and anybody can go to them for the details, for all I care. But what interests
me is this:
In one way all this ancient sin
was infinitely superior, immeasurably superior, to the modern sin. All those
who write of it at least agree on one fact; that it was the cult of
Fruitfulness. It was unfortunately too often interwoven, very closely, with the
cult of the fruitfulness of the land. It was at least on the side of Nature. It
was at least on the side of Life. It has been left to the last Christians, or
rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying
Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a
worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an
erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility. The new
Paganism literally merits the reproach of Swinburne, when mourning for the old
Paganism: "and rears not the bountiful token and spreads not the fatherly
feast." The new priests abolish the fatherhood and keep the feast - to
themselves. They are worse than Swinburne's Pagans. The priests of Priapus and
Cotytto [fertility deities.] go into the kingdom of heaven before them.
Now it is not unnatural that this
unnatural separation, between sex and fruitfulness, which even the Pagans would
have thought a perversion, has been accompanied with a similar separation and
perversion about the nature of the love of the land. In both departments there
is precisely the same fallacy; which it is quite possible to state precisely.
The reason why our contemporary countrymen do not understand what we mean by
Property is that they only think of it in the sense of Money; in the sense of
salary; in the sense of something which is immediately consumed, enjoyed and
expended; something which gives momentary pleasure and disappears. They do not
understand that we mean by Property something that includes that pleasure
incidentally; but begins and ends with something far more grand and worthy and
creative. The man who makes an orchard where there has been a field, who owns
the orchard and decides to whom it shall descend, does also enjoy the taste of
apples; and let us hope, also, the taste of cider. But he is doing smething
very much grander, and ultimately more gratifying, than merely eating an apple.
He is imposing his will upon the world in the manner of the charter given him
by the will of God; he is asserting that his soul is his own, and does not
belong to the Orchard Survey Department, or the chief Trust in the Apple Trade.
But he is also doing something which was implicit in all the most ancient
religions of the earth; in those great panoramas of pageantry and ritual that
followed the order of the seasons in China or Babylonia; he is worshipping the
fruitfulness of the world. Now the notion of narrowing property merely to
<enjoying> money is exactly like the notion of narrowing love merely to
<enjoying> sex. In both cases an incidental, isolated, servile and even
secretive pleasure is substituted for participation in a great creative
process; even in the everlasting Creation of the world.
The two sinister things can be
seen side by side in the system of Bolshevist Russia; for Communism is the only
complete and logical working model of Capitalism. The sins are there a system
which are everywhere else a sort of repeated blunder. From the first, it is
admitted, that the whole system was directed towards encouraging or driving the
worker to spend his wages; to have nothing left on the next pay day; to enjoy
everything and consume everything and efface everything; in short, to shudder
at the thought of only one crime; the creative crime of thrift. It was a tame
extravagance; a sort of disciplined dissipation; a meek and submissive
prodigality. For the moment the slave left off drinking all his wages, the
moment he began to hoard or hide any property, he would be saving up something
which might ultimately purchase his liberty. He might begin to count for
something in the State; that is, he might become less of a slave and more of a
citizen. Morally considered, there has been nothing quite so unspeakably mean
as this Bolshevist generosity. But it will be noted that exactly the same
spirit and tone pervades the manner of dealing with the other matter. Sex also
is to come to the slave merely as a pleasure; that it may never be a power. He
is to know as little as possible, or at least to think as little as possible,
of the pleasure as anything else except a pleasure; to think or know nothing of
where it comes from or where it will go to, when once the soiled object has
passed through his own hands. He is not to trouble about its origin in the
purposes of God or its sequel in the posterity of man. In every department he
is not a possessor, but only a consumer; even if it be of the first elements of
life and fire in so far as they are consumable; he is to have no notion of the
sort of Burning Bush that burns and is not consumed. For that bush only grows
on the soil, on the real land where human beings can behold it; and the spot on
which they stand is holy ground. Thus there is an exact parallel between the
two modern moral, or immoral, ideas of social reform. The world has forgotten
simultaneously that the making of a Farm is something much larger than the
making of a profit, or even a product, in the sense of liking the taste of
beetroot sugar; and that the founding of a Family is something much larger than
sex in the limited sense of current literature; which was anticipated in one
bleak and blinding flash in a single line of George Meredith; "And eat our
pot of honey on the grave."
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
The explanation, or excuse, for
this essay is to be found in a certain notion, which seems to me very obvious,
but which I have never, as it happens, seen stated by anybody else. It happens
rather to cut across the common frontiers of current controversy. It can be
used for or against Democracy, according to whether that swear-word is or is
not printed with a big D. It can be connected, like most things, with religion;
but only rather indirectly with my own religion. It is primarily the
recognition of a fact, quite apart from the approval or disapproval of the
fact. But it does involve the assertion that what has really happened, in the
modern world, is practically the precise contrary of what is supposed to have
happened there.
The thesis is this: that modern
emancipation has really been a new persecution of the Common Man. If it has
emancipated anybody, it has in rather special and narrow ways emancipated the
Uncommon Man. It has given an eccentric sort of liberty to some of the hobbies
of the wealthy, and occasionally to some of the more humane lunacies of the
cultured. The only thing that it has forbidden is common sense, as it would
have been understood by the common people. Thus, if we begin with the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find that a man really has become more
free to found a sect. But the Common Man does not in the least want to found a
sect. He is much more likely, for instance, to want to found a family. And it
is exactly <there> that the modern emancipators are quite likely to begin
to frustrate him; in the name of Malthusianism or Eugenics or Sterilisation or
at a more advanced stage of progress, probably, Infanticide. It would be a model
of modern liberty to tell him that he might preach anything, however wild,
about the Virgin Birth, so long as he avoided anything like a natural birth;
and that he was welcome to build a tin chapel to preach a twopenny creed,
entirely based on the text, "Enoch begat Methuselah", so long as he
himself is forbidden to beget anybody. And, as a matter of historical fact, the
sects which enjoyed this sectarian freedom, in the seventeenth or eighteenth
centuries, were generally founded by merchants or manufacturers of the
comfortable, and sometimes of the luxurious classes. On the other hand, it is
strictly to the lower classes, to use the liberal modern title for the poor,
that such schemes as Sterilisation are commonly directed and applied.
It is the same when we pass from
the Protestant world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the
Progressive world of the nineteenth and twentieth. Here the form of freedom
mostly claimed, as a boast and a dogma, is the freedom of the Press. It is no
longer merely a freedom of pamphlets but a freedom of papers; or rather, it is
less and less a freedom at all, and more and more a monopoly. But the important
point is that the process, the test and the comparison are the same as in the
first example. Modern emancipation means this: that anybody who can afford it
can publish a newspaper. But the Common Man would not want to publish a
newspaper, even if he could afford it. He might want, for instance, to go on
talking politics in a pothouse or the parlour of an inn. And that is exactly
the sort of really popular talk about politics which modern movements have
often abolished: the old democracies by forbidding the pothouse, the new
dictatorships by forbidding the politics.
Or again, it is the boast of
recent emancipated ethics and politics not to put any great restraints upon
anybody who wants to publish a book, especially a scientific book, full of
psychology or sociology; and perhaps unavoidably full of perversions and polite
pornography. As that modern tendency increased, it was less and less likely
that the police would interfere very much with a man publishing the sort of
book that only the wealthy could publish with sumptuous artistic plates or
scientific diagrams. It is much more probable, in most modern societies, ' that
the police would be found interfering with a man singing a song, of a coarse
and candid description, bawling out a ballad of the grosser sort, or even using
the more restrained medium of prose with a similar lack of restraint. Yet there
is a great deal to be said for song, or even speech, of the old ribald sort, as
compared with writing of the new sort, when it is at once analytic and
anarchic. The old obscenity bad a gusto and a great virility even in its
violence, which is not easily rendered in a diagram or a table of statistics;
and the old was always normal and never had any of the horrors of abnormality.
The point is that, here again, the Common Man does not generally want to write
a book, whereas he may occasionally want to sing a song. He certainly does not
want to write a book on psychology or sociology - or to read, it. But he does
want to talk, to sing, to shout, to yell and howl on due and suitable
occasions; and, rightly or wrongly, it is when he is thus engaged that he is
much more likely to fall foul of a policeman than when he is (as he never is)
writing a scientific study of a new theory of sex. The upshot of uplift, in the
modern sense, is the same in practice as in the previous examples. In the
actual atmosphere of the age, men will still be arrested for using a certain
kind of language, long after they cannot be arrested for writing a certain kind
of literature.
It would be easy to give other
examples; but these contemporary examples are already too continuous to be a
coincidence. It is equally true, for instance, that the liberating movement of
the eighteenth century, the life in the American and French Revolutions, while
it did really vindicate many virtues of republican simplicity and civic
liberty, also accepted as virtues several things that were obviously vices:
that had been recognised as vices long before, and are now again beginning to
be recognised as vices so long afterwards. Where even ambition had once been a
pardonable vice, avarice became an utterly unpardonable virtue. Liberal economics
too often meant merely giving to those already rich the liberty to grow richer,
and magnificently granting to the poor the permission to remain rather poorer
than before. It was much more certain that the usurer was released to practise
usury than that the peasant was released from the practices of the usurer. It
was much more certain that the Wheat Pit was as big as the Bottomless Pit, than
that the man who grew wheat would ever be found anywhere except at the bottom.
There was a sense in which
"liberal economics" were a proclamation of freedom, for the few who
were rich enough to be free. Nobody thought there was anything queer about
talking of prominent public men "gambling" in the Wheat Pit. But all
this time, there were laws of all kinds against normal human gambling; that is,
against games of chance. The poor man was prevented from gambling, precisely
because he did not gamble so much as the rich man. The beadle or the policeman
might stop children from playing chuckfarthing; but it was strictly because it
was only a farthing that was chucked. Progress never interfered with the game
of chuck-fortune, because much more than a farthing was being chucked. The
enlightened and emancipated age especially encouraged those who chucked away
other people's fortunes instead of their own. But anyhow, the comparison
remains continuous and clear. Progress, in the sense of the progress that has
progressed since the sixteenth century, has upon every matter persecuted the
Common Man; punished the gambling he enjoys and permitted the gambling he
cannot follow; restrained the obscenity that might amuse him and applauded the
obscenity that would certainly bore him; silenced the political quarrels that
can be conducted among men and applauded the political stunts and syndicates
that can only be conducted by millionaires; encouraged anybody who had anything
to say against God, if it was said with a priggish and supercilious accent; but
discouraged anybody who had anything to say in favour of Man, in his common
relations to manhood and motherhood and the normal appetites of nature.
Progress has been merely the persecution of the Common Man.
Progress has a hagiology, a
martyrology, a mass of miraculous legends of its own, like any other religion;
and they are mostly false and belong to a false religion. The most famous is
the fancy that the young and progressive person is always martyred by the old
and ordinary person. But it is false. It is the old and ordinary person who is
almost always the martyr. It is the old and ordinary person who has been more
and more despoiled of all his old and ordinary rights. In so far as this
progress progresses, it is far more likely that six million men will be
forbidden to go to sleep, because six men say that certain breathing exercises
are a substitute for slumber, than that any of the six million somnambulists
will wake up sufficiently to clout the six men over their highbrowed but
half-witted heads. There is no normal thing that cannot now be taken from the
normal man. It is much more likely that a law will be passed to forbid the
eating of grain (notoriously the parent of poisons like beer and whisky) than
that it will be even faintly suggested, to men of that philosophy, that the
economic evil is that men cannot grow grain, and that the ethical evil is that
men are still despised for growing it. Given the purely progressive principle,
and nothing else as a guide to our future, it is entirely possible that they
may be hanged or buried alive for growing it. But of course, in a scientific age,
they will be electrocuted - or perhaps only tortured by electricity.
Thus far my thesis is this: that
it is not the Uncommon Man who is persecuted; but rather the Common Man. But
this brings me into direct conflict with the contemporary reaction, which seems
to say, in effect, that the Common Man had much better be persecuted. It is
quite certain that many modern thinkers and -writers honestly feel a contempt
for the Common Man; it is also quite certain that I myself feel a contempt for
those who feel this contempt. But the actual issue must be faced more fully; -
because what is called the reaction against democracy is at this moment the
chief result of democracy. Now on this quarrel I am democratic, or at least
defiant of the attacks of democracy. I do not believe that most modern people
have seen the real point of the advantage or disadvantage of popular rule; and
my doubt can be very largely suggested and summarised under this title of the
Common Man.
To put it briefly; it is now the
custom to say that most modern blunders have been due to the Common Man. And I
should like to point out what appalling blunders have in fact been due to the
Uncommon Man. It is easy enough to argue that the mob makes mistakes; but as a
fact it never has a chance even to make mistakes until its superiors have used
their superiority to make much worse mistakes. It is easy to weary of democracy
and cry out for an intellectual aristocracy. But the trouble is that every
intellectual aristocracy seems to have been utterly unintellectual. Anybody
might guess beforehand that there would be blunders of the ignorant. What
nobody could have guessed, what nobody could have dreamed of in a nightmare,
what no morbid mortal imagination could ever have dared to imagine, was the
mistakes of the well-informed. It is true, in a sense, to say that the mob has
always been led by more educated men. It is much more true, in every sense, to
say that it has always been misled by educated men. It is easy enough to say
the cultured man should be the crowd's guide, philosopher and friend.
Unfortunately, he has nearly always been a misguiding guide, a false friend and
a very shallow philosopher. And the actual catastrophes we have suffered,
including those we are now suffering, have not in historical fact been due to
the prosaic practical people who are supposed to know nothing, but almost
invariably to the highly theoretical people who knew that they knew everything.
The world may learn. by its mistakes; but they are mostly the mistakes of the
learned.
To go back no further than the
seventeenth century, the quarrel between the Puritans and the populace was
originally due to the pride of a few men in being able to read a printed book,
and their scorn for people who had good memories, good traditions, good stories,
good songs, and good pictures in glass or gold or graven stone, and therefore
had less need of books. It was a tyranny of literates over illiterates. But it
was the literates who were narrow, sullen, limited and often oppressive; it was
the illiterates who were, at least relatively, gay and free and fanciful and
imaginative and interested in everything. The Uncommon Men, the elect of the
Calvinist theory, did undoubtedly lead the people along the next stretch of the
path of progress; but what it led to was a prison. The book-reading rulers and
statesmen managed to establish the Scottish Sabbath. Meanwhile, a thousand
traditions, of the sort they -would have trampled out, yet managed to trickle
down from the medieval poor to the modern poor, and lingering as legends in
countless cottages and farmhouses, were collected by Scott (often repeated
orally by people who could not read or write) to combine in the construction of
the great Scottish Romances, which profoundly moved and partly inspired the
Romantic Movement throughout the world.
When we pass to the eighteenth
century, we find the same part played by a new and quite contrary party;
differing from the last in everything except in being the same sort of rather
dried up aristocracy. The new Uncommon Men, now leading the people, are no
longer Calvinists, but a dry sort of Deists drying up more and more like
Atheists; and they are no longer pessimists but the reverse; only their
optimism is often more depressing than pessimism. There were the Benthamites, the
Utilitarians, the servants of the Economic Man; the first Free-Traders. They
have the credit of having first made clear the economic theories of the modern
state; and the calculations on which were mainly based the politics of the
nineteenth century. It was they who taught these things scientifically and
systematically to the public, and even to the populace. But what were the
things, and what were the theories? Perhaps the best and broadest of them was a
most monstrous and mythical superstition of Adam Smith; a theological theory
that providence had so made the world that men might be happy through their
selfishness; or, in other words, that God would overrule everything for good,
if only men could succeed in being sufficiently bad. The intellectuals in this
epoch taught definitely and dogmatically that if only men would buy and sell
freely, lend or borrow freely, sweat or sack freely, and in practice, steal or
swindle freely, humanity would be happy. The Common Man soon found out how
happy; in the Slums where they left him and in the Slump to which they led him.
We need not continue, through the
last two centuries, all the tale of the frenzy and folly inflicted by the
fickleness of the educated class on the relative stability of the uneducated.
The fickle intellectuals next rushed to the other extreme, and became
Socialists, despising small property as they had despised popular tradition. It
is quite true that these intellectuals had a lucid interval in which they
proclaimed some primary truth, along with many priggish falsehoods. Some of
them did rightly exalt liberty and human dignity and equality, as expressed in
the Declaration of Independence. But even that was so much mishandled that
there is now a disposition to deny the truth along with the falsehood. There
has been a reaction against Democracy; or, in plain words, the prigs are now
too bored even to go on with their normal routine about the Common Man; the
familiar routine of oppressing him in practice and adoring him in theory.
I do not adore him, but I do
believe in him; at least I believe in him much more than I believe in them. I
think the actual history of the relations between him and them, as I have
narrated it, is enough to justify my preference. I repeat that they have had
all the educational advantages over him; they have always led him; and they
have always misled him. And even in becoming reactionaries, they remain as raw
and crude as when they were revolutionaries. Their anti-democracy is as much
stuffed with cant as their democracy. I need only allude to the detestable new
fashion of referring to ordinary men as morons. First, it is pedantry, the
dullest form of vanity; for a moron is only the Greek for a fool; and it is
mostly sham pedantry, for most of those who mention morons hardly know they are
talking Greek, still less why on earth they should. It also involves this moral
evil: that a man who says that men are mostly fools knows at least that he has
often made a fool of himself; whereas the morons are thought of like monkeys;
as if they were a fixed tribe or caste. The Common Man may well be the victim
of a new series of tyrannies, founded on this scientific fad of regarding him
as a monkey. But it is doubtful whether he can be much more persecuted for
having the instincts of a moron, than he has already been for having the
instincts of a man.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
It grows plainer, every day, that
those of us who cling to crumbling creeds and dogmas, and defend the dying
traditions of the Dark Ages, will soon be left alone defending the most
obviously decaying of all those ancient dogmas: the idea called Democracy. It
has taken not quite a lifetime, roughly my own lifetime, to bring it from the
top of its success, or alleged success, to the bottom of its failure, or reputed
failure. By the end of the nineteenth century, millions of men were accepting
democracy without knowing why. By the end of the twentieth century, it looks as
if millions of people will be rejecting democracy, also without knowing why. In
such a straight, strictly logical and unwavering line does the Mind of Man
advance along the great Path of Progress.
Anyhow, at the moment, democracy
is not only being abused, but being very unfairly abused. Men are blaming
universal suffrage, merely because they are not enlightened enough to blame
original sin. There is one simple test for deciding whether popular political
evils are due to original sin. And that is to do what none or very few of these
modern malcontents are doing; to state any sort of moral claim for any other
sort of political system. The essence of democracy is very simple and, as
Jefferson said, self-evident. If ten men are wrecked together on a desert
island, the community consists of those ten men, their welfare is the social
object, and normally their will is the social law. If they have not a natural
claim to rule themselves, which of them has a natural claim to rule the rest?
To say that the cleverest or boldest will rule is to beg the moral question. If
his talents are used for the community, in planning voyages or distilling
water, then he is the servant of the community; which is, in that sense, his
sovereign. If his talents are used against the community by stealing rum or
poisoning water, why should the community submit to him? and is it in the least
likely that it will? In such a simple case as that, everybody can see the
popular basis of the thing, and the advantage of government by consent. The
trouble with democracy is that it has never, in modern times, had to do with
such a simple case as that. In other words, the trouble with democracy is not
democracy. It is certain artificial anti-democratic things that have, in fact,
thrust themselves into the modern world to thwart and destroy democracy.
Modernity is not democracy;
machinery is not democracy; the surrender of everything to trade and commerce
is not democracy. Capitalism is not democracy; and is admittedly, by trend and
savour, rather against democracy. Plutocracy by definition is not democracy.
But all these modern things forced themselves into the world at about the time,
or shortly after the time, when great idealists like Rousseau and Jefferson
happened to have been thinking about the democratic ideal of democracy. It is
tenable that the ideal was too idealist to succeed. It is not tenable that the
ideal that failed was the same as the realities that did succeed. It is one
thing to say that a fool went into a jungle and was devoured by wild beasts; it
is quite another to say that he himself survives as the one and only wild
beast. Democracy has had everything against it in practice, and that very fact
may be something against it in theory. It may be argued that it has human life
against it. But, at any rate, it is quite certain that it has modern life
against it. The industrial and scientific world of the last hundred years has
been much more unsuitable a setting for the experiment of the self-government
than would have been found in old conditions of agrarian or even nomadic life.
Feudal manorial life was a not a democracy; but it could have been much more
easily turned into a democracy. Later peasant life, as in France or
Switzerland, actually has been quite easily turned into a democracy. But it is
horribly hard to turn what is called modern industrial democracy into a
democracy.
That is why many men are now
beginning to say that the democratic ideal is no longer in touch with the
modern spirit. I strongly agree; and I naturally prefer the democratic ideal,
which is at least an ideal, and therefore, an idea, to the modern spirit, which
is simply modern, therefore, already becoming ancient. I notice that the
cranks, whom it would be more polite to call the idealists, are already
hastening to shed this ideal. A well-known Pacifist, with whom I argued in
Radical papers in my Radical days, and who then passed as a pattern Republican
of the new Republic, went out of his way the other day to say, 'The voice of
the people is commonly the voice of Satan.' The truth is that these Liberals
never did really believe in popular government, any more than in anything else
that was popular, such as pubs or the Dublin Sweepstake. They did not believe
in the democracy they invoked against kings and priests. But I did believe in
it; and I do believe in it, though I much preferred to invoke it against prigs
and faddists. I still believe it would be the most human sort of government, if
it could be once more attempted in a more human time.
Unfortunately, humanitarianism has
been the mark of an inhuman time. And by inhumanity I do not mean merely
cruelty; I mean the condition in which even cruelty ceases to be human. I mean
the condition in which the rich man, instead of hanging six or seven of his
enemies because he hates them, merely beggars and starves to death six or seven
thousand people whom he does not hate, and has never seen, because they live at
the other side of the world. I mean the condition in which the courtier or
pander of the rich man, instead of excitedly mixing a rare, original poison for
the Borgias, or carving exquisite ornamental poignard for the political
purposes of the Medici, works monotonously in a factory turning out a small
type of screw, which will fit into a plate he will never see; to form part of a
gun he will never see; to be used in a battle he will never see, and about the
merits of which he knows far less than the Renaissance rascal knew about the
purposes of the poison and the dagger. In short, what is the matter with
industrialism is indirection; the fact that nothing is straightforward; that
all its ways are crooked even when they are meant to be straight. Into this
most indirect of all systems we tried to fit the most direct of all ideas.
Democracy, an ideal which is simple to excess, was vainly applied to a society
which was complex to the point of craziness. It is not so very surprising that
such a vision has faded in such an environment. Personally, I like the vision;
but it takes all sorts to make a world, and there actually are human beings,
walking about quite calmly in the daylight, who appear to like the environment.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Illustrated London News, July 30, 1921
I could never see why a man who is
not free to open his mouth to drink should be free to open it to talk. Talking
does far more direct harm to other people. The village suffers less directly
from the village drunkard than it might from the village tale bearer, or the
village tub-thumper, or the village villain who seduces the village maiden.
These and twenty other types of evil are done simply by talking; it is certain
that a vast amount of evil would be prevented if we all wore gags. And the
answer is not to deny that slander is a social poison, or seduction a spiritual
murder. The answer is that, unless a man is allowed to talk, he might as well
be a chimpanzee who is only able to chatter. In other words, if a man loses the
responsibility for these rudimentary functions and forms of freedom, he loses
not only his citizenship, but his manhood.
But there are other personal
liberties still permitted us, more elaborate and civilized than that simple
human speech which is still closely akin to the chatter of the chimpanzees. By
some official oversight, which I am quite unable to explain, we are still
allowed to write private letters if we put them in public pillar-boxes. The
Postmaster-General does not write all our letters for us; even the local
postman has as yet no such local powers. I cannot conceive how it is that
reformers have failed to note the need for uniting, reorganizing, coordinating,
codifying, and linking up all this complex, chaotic, and wasteful system, or
lack of system. There must be vast amounts of overlapping, with some six young
gentlemen writing letters to one young lady. There must be a terribly low
educational standard, with all sorts of poor people allowed to put into a
private letter any spelling or grammar they like. There must be a number of bad
psychological habits being formed, by foolish people writing their sons in the
Colonies or their mothers in the workhouse. And all this anarchy and
deterioration could be stopped by the simple process of standardisation of all
correspondence. I know if I use the word "standardisation," Mr. H.G.
Wells will welcome it and begin to think of it seriously [indeed there opens
before me a vista of vast social reform].
On the face of it, the first and
most obvious method would be for the Government to send round official forms
for our friendly correspondence, to be filled up like the forms about insurance
or Income Tax. Here and there, even in the most model communication, there
would be words left blank, which the individual might be allowed to fill out
himself. I have a half-formed ideal of an official love letter, printed in the
manner of "I __________you," so that the citizen might insert
"love," or "like," or "adore," with a view to the
new civil marriage; or "renounce," or "repudiate," or
"execrate," with a view to the newer and more civil divorce. But even
these blanks for verbal variation must be admitted with caution; for the aim of
the whole reform is to raise the general level of all correspondence to a
height unattainable by the majority of the people as yet.
It may be hinted that I plead for
this reform with the passion of self interest, for it would enable me to
neglect my correspondence in theory as I already neglect it in practice. I very
seldom write to anybody; and I never write to the people I like best. About
them I do not trouble, for they understand. But there are unanswered letters
from total strangers about which I feel a remorse. Some day I shall make a list
of the people I should have liked to answer, or advertise for them by such
details as I can remember them. If I had any money I should like to leave them
millions of it when I die. It may be said that I should get off cheaply, if the
government would sent round to all these people an official card in my name
[instead].
But I am not really converted to
my own project, even by my own failure. I am not really convinced of the
necessity of standardised correspondence, either by the existence of criminal
letters or my own criminal neglect of letters. If or when, in some strange mood
at some distant date, I should actually answer a letter, I should still prefer
to answer it myself. even if I had nothing to write except an apology for not
writing, I should prefer my self-abasement to have the character of
self-determination.
It is a most extraordinary fact
that all modern talk about self-determination is applied to everything except
the self. It is applied to the State but it is not applied to the very thing to
which its verbal formula professes to apply. I, for one, do believe in that
mystical doctrine of democracy, which pre-supposes that England has a soul, or
that France has a self. But surely it is much more obvious and ordinary fact
that Jones has a self and Robinson has a self. And the question I have here
discussed under the parable of the Post Office is not the question of whether
there are abuses in drink or diet, as there are calumny and blackmail in any
pillar-box or postman's bag. It is the question of whether in these days the
claims of government are to leave anything whatever of the rights of man.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Rafael Gil-Nogués
ragilno@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
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