Human Nature in Politics Part 5

[22] _Heretics_, p. 122.

When a vivid a.s.sociation has been once formed it sinks into the ma.s.s of our mental experience, and may then undergo developments and transformations with which deliberate ratiocination had very little to do. I have been told that when an English agitation against the importation of Chinese contract labour into South Africa was proposed, an important personage said that 'there was not a vote in it.' But the agitation was set on foot, and was based on a rational argument that the conditions enacted by the Ordinance amounted to a rather cruel kind of slavery imposed upon unusually intelligent Asiatics. Any one, however, who saw much of politics in the winter of 1905-6 must have noticed that the pictures of Chinamen on the h.o.a.rdings aroused among very many of the voters an immediate hatred of the Mongolian racial type.

This hatred was transferred to the Conservative party, and towards the end of the general election of 1906 a picture of a Chinaman thrown suddenly on a lantern screen before a working-cla.s.s audience would have aroused an instantaneous howl of indignation against Mr. Balfour.

After the election, however, the memory of the Chinese faces on the posters tended slowly to identify itself, in the minds of the Conservatives, with the Liberals who had used them. I had at the general election worked in a const.i.tuency in which many such posters were displayed by my side, and where we were beaten. A year later I stood for the London County Council in the same const.i.tuency. An hour before the close of the poll I saw, with the unnatural clearness of polling-day fatigue, a large white face at the window of the ward committee-room, while a hoa.r.s.e voice roared: 'Where's your b.l.o.o.d.y pigtail? We cut it off last time: and now we'll put it round your b.l.o.o.d.y neck and strangle you.'

In February 1907, during the County Council election, there appeared on the London h.o.a.rdings thousands of posters which were intended to create a belief that the Progressive members on the Council made their personal livelihood by defrauding the ratepayers. If a statement had been published to that effect it would have been an appeal to the critical intellect, and could have been met by argument, or in the law courts.

But the appeal was made to the process of subconscious inference. The poster consisted of a picture of a man supposed to represent the Progressive Party, pointing a foreshortened finger and saying, with sufficient ambiguity to escape the law of libel: 'It's your money we want.' Its effectiveness depended on its exploitation of the fact that most men judge of the truth of a charge of fraud by a series of rapid and unconscious inferences from the appearance of the man accused. The person represented was, if judged by the shape of his hat, the fas.h.i.+on of his watch-chain and ring, the neglected condition of his teeth, and the redness of his nose, obviously a professional sharper. He was, I believe, drawn by an American artist, and his face and clothes had a vaguely American appearance, which, in the region of subconscious a.s.sociation, further suggested to most onlookers the idea of Tammany Hall. This poster was brilliantly successful, but, now that the election is over, it, like the Chinese pictures, seems likely to continue a career of irrational transference. One notices that one Progressive evening paper uses a reduced copy of it whenever it wishes to imply that the Moderates are influenced by improper pecuniary motives. I myself find that it tends to a.s.sociate itself in my mind with the energetic politician who induced the railway companies and others to pay for it, and who, for all I know, may in his own personal appearance recall the best traditions of the English gentleman.

Writers on the 'psychology of the crowd' have pointed out the effect of excitement and numbers in subst.i.tuting non-rational for rational inference. Any cause, however, which prevents a man from giving full attention to his mental processes may produce the phenomena of non-rational inference in an extreme degree. I have often watched in some small sub-committee the method by which either of the two men with a real genius for committee work whom I know could control his colleagues. The process was most successful towards the end of an afternoon, when the members were tired and somewhat dazed with the effort of following a rapid talker through a ma.s.s of unfamiliar detail.

If at that point the operator slightly quickened the flow of his information, and slightly emphasised the a.s.sumption that he was being thoroughly understood, he could put some at least of his colleagues into a sort of waking trance, in which they would have cheerfully a.s.sented to the proposition that the best means of securing, _e.g.,_ the permanence of private schools was a large and immediate increase in the number of public schools.

It is sometimes argued that such non-rational inferences are merely the loose fringe of our political thinking, and that responsible decisions in politics, whether they are right or wrong, are always the result of conscious ratiocination. American political writers, for instance, of the traditional intellectualist type are sometimes faced with the fact that the delegates to national party conventions, when they select candidates and adopt programmes for Presidential elections, are not in a condition in which they are likely to examine the logical validity of their own mental processes. Such writers fall back on the reflection that the actual choice of President is decided not by excited conventions, but by voters coming straight from the untroubled sanctuary of the American home.

President Garfield ill.u.s.trated this point of view in an often-quoted pa.s.sage of his speech to the Republican Convention of 1880:--

'I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man. But I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured.... Not here, in this brilliant circle where fifteen thousand men and women are gathered, is the destiny of the Republic to be decreed for the next four years ... but by four millions of Republican firesides, where the thoughtful voters, with wives and children about them, with the calm thoughts inspired by love of home and country, with the history of the past, the hopes of the future, and knowledge of the great men who have adorned and blessed our nation in days gone by. There G.o.d prepares the verdict that shall determine the wisdom of our work to-night.'[23]

[23] _Life of J.A. Garfield_, by R. H. Conwell, p. 328.

But the divine oracle, whether in America or in England, turns out, too often, only to be a tired householder, reading the headlines and personal paragraphs of his party newspaper, and half-consciously forming mental habits of mean suspicion or national arrogance. Sometimes, indeed, during an election, one feels that it is, after all, in big meetings, where big thoughts can be given with all their emotional force, that the deeper things of politics have the best chance of recognition.

The voter as he reads his newspaper may adopt by suggestion, and make habitual by repet.i.tion, not only political opinions but whole trains of political argument; and he does not necessarily feel the need of comparing them with other trains of argument already in his mind. A lawyer or a doctor will on quite general principles argue for the most extreme trade-unionism in his own profession, while he thoroughly agrees with a denunciation of trade-unionism addressed to him as a railway shareholder or ratepayer. The same audience can sometimes be led by way of 'parental rights' to cheer for denominational religious instruction, and by way of 'religious freedom' to hoot it. The most skilled political observer that I know, speaking of an organised newspaper attack, said, 'As far as I can make out every argument used in attack and in defence has its separate and independent effect. They hardly ever meet, even if they are brought to bear upon the same mind.' From the purely tactical point of view there is therefore much to be said for Lord Lyndhurst's maxim, 'Never defend yourself before a popular a.s.semblage, except with and by retorting the attack; the hearers, in the pleasure which the a.s.sault gives them, will forget the previous charge.'[24]

[24] Morley's _Life of Gladstone_, vol. i. p. 122.

CHAPTER IV

THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING

But man is fortunately not wholly dependent in his political thinking upon those forms of inference by immediate a.s.sociation which come so easily to him, and which he shares with the higher brutes. The whole progress of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than we could if we merely followed the line of least resistance in the use of our minds.

These methods, however, when applied in politics, still represent a difficult and uncertain art rather than a science producing its effects with mechanical accuracy.

When the great thinkers of Greece laid down rules for valid reasoning, they had, it is true, the needs of politics specially in their minds.

After the prisoners in Plato's cave of illusion should be unbound by true philosophy it was to the service of the State that they were to devote themselves, and their first triumph was to be the control of pa.s.sion by reason in the sphere of government. Yet if Plato could visit us now, he would learn that while our gla.s.s-makers proceed by rigorous and confident processes to exact results, our statesmen, like the gla.s.s-makers of ancient Athens, still trust to empirical maxims and personal skill. Why is it, he would ask us, that valid reasoning has proved to be so much more difficult in politics than in the physical sciences?

Our first answer might be found in the character of the material with which political reasoning has to deal. The universe which presents itself to our reason is the same as that which presents itself to our feelings and impulses--an unending stream of sensations and memories, every one of which is different from every other, and before which, unless we can select and recognise and simplify, we must stand helpless and unable either to act or think. Man has therefore to create ent.i.ties that shall be the material of his reasoning, just as he creates ent.i.ties to be the objects of his emotions and the stimulus of his instinctive inferences.

Exact reasoning requires exact comparison, and in the desert or the forest there were few things which our ancestors could compare exactly.

The heavenly bodies seem, indeed, to have been the first objects of consciously exact reasoning, because they were so distant that nothing could be known of them except position and movement, and their position and movement could be exactly compared from night to night.

In the same way the foundation of the terrestrial sciences came from two discoveries, first, that it was possible to abstract single qualities, such as position and movement, in all things however unlike, from the other qualities of those things and to compare them exactly; and secondly, that it was possible artificially to create actual uniformities for the purpose of comparison, to make, that is to say, out of unlike things, things so like that valid inferences could be drawn as to their behaviour under like circ.u.mstances. Geometry, for instance, came into the service of man when it was consciously realised that all units of land and water were exactly alike in so far as they were extended surfaces. Metallurgy, on the other hand, only became a science when men could actually take two pieces of copper ore, unlike in shape and appearance and chemical const.i.tution, and extract from them two pieces of copper so nearly alike that they would give the same results when treated in the same way.

This second power over his material the student of politics can never possess. He can never create an artificial uniformity in man. He cannot, after twenty generations of education or breeding render even two human beings sufficiently like each other for him to prophesy with any approach to certainty that they will behave alike under like circ.u.mstances.

How far has he the first power? How far can he abstract from the facts of man's state qualities in respect of which men are sufficiently comparable to allow of valid political reasoning?

On April 5th, 1788, a year before the taking of the Bastille John Adams, then American Amba.s.sador to England, and afterwards President of the United States, wrote to a friend describing the 'fermentation upon the subject of government' throughout Europe. 'Is Government a science or not?' he describes men as asking. 'Are there any principles on which it is founded? What are its ends? If indeed there is no rule, no standard, all must be accident and chance. If there is a standard, what is it?'[25]

[25] _Memoir of T. Brand Hollis_, by J. Disney, p. 32.

Again and again in the history of political thought men have believed themselves to have found this 'standard,' this fact about man which should bear the same relation to politics which the fact that all things can be weighed bears to physics, and the fact that all things can be measured bears to geometry.

Some of the greatest thinkers of the past have looked for it in the final causes of man's existence. Every man differed, it is true, from every other man, but these differences all seemed related to a type of perfect manhood which, though few men approached, and none attained it, all were capable of conceiving. May not, asked Plato, this type be the pattern--the 'idea'--of man formed by G.o.d and laid up 'in a heavenly place'? If so, men would have attained to a valid science of politics when by careful reasoning and deep contemplation they had come to know that pattern. Henceforward all the fleeting and varying things of sense would be seen in their due relation to the eternal and immutable purposes of G.o.d.

Or the relation of man to G.o.d's purpose was thought of not as that between the pattern and the copy, but as that between the mind of a legislator as expressed in enacted law, and the individual instance to which the law is applied. We can, thought Locke, by reflecting on the moral facts of the world, learn G.o.d's law. That law confers on us certain rights which we can plead in the Court of G.o.d, and from which a valid political science can be deduced. We know our rights with the same certainty that we know his law.

'Men,' wrote Locke, 'being all the workmans.h.i.+p of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business; they are his property whose workmans.h.i.+p they are, made to last during his, not one another's, pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy another as if we were made for one another's uses as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.'[26]

[26] Locke, _Second Treatise of Government_, 1690, ed. 1821, p. 191.

When the leaders of the American revolution sought for certainty in their argument against George the Third they too found it in the fact that men 'are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.'

Rousseau and his French followers rested these rights on a presumed social contract. Human rights stood upon that contract as the elephant upon the tortoise, though the contract itself, like the tortoise, was apt to stand upon nothing at all.

At this point Bentham, backed by the sense of humour of mankind, swept aside the whole conception of a science of politics deduced from natural right. 'What sort of a thing,' he asked, 'is a natural right, and where does the maker live, particularly in Atheist's Town, where they are most rife?'[27]

[27] _Escheat vice Taxation_, Bentham's Works, vol. ii. p. 598.

Bentham himself believed that he had found the standard in the fact that all men seek pleasure and avoid pain. In that respect men were measurable and comparable. Politics and jurisprudence could therefore be made experimental sciences in exactly the same sense as physics or chemistry. 'The present work,' wrote Bentham, 'as well as any other work of mine that has been or will be published on the subject of legislation or any other branch of moral science, is an attempt to extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral.'[28]

[28] MS. in University College, London, quoted by Halevy, _La Jeunesse de Bentham_, pp. 289-290.

Bentham's standard of 'pleasure and pain' const.i.tuted in many ways an important advance upon 'natural right.' It was in the first place founded upon a universally accepted fact; all men obviously do feel both pleasure and pain. That fact was to a certain extent measurable. One could, for instance, count the number of persons who suffered this year from an Indian famine, and compare it with the number of those who suffered last year. It was clear also that some pains and pleasures were more intense than others, and that therefore the same man could in a given number of seconds experience varying amounts of pleasure or pain.

Above all, the standard of pleasure and pain was one external to the political thinker himself. John Stuart Mill quotes Bentham as saying of all philosophies which competed with his Utilitarianism: 'They consist, all of them, in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept the author's sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself.'[29]

[29] Bentham's _Works_, vol. i. p. 8, quoted in Lytton's _England and the English_ (1833), p. 469. This pa.s.sage was written by Mill, cf.

preface.

A 'Benthamite,' therefore, whether he was a member of Parliament like Grote or Molesworth, or an official like Chadwick, or an organising politician like Francis Place, could always check his own feelings about 'rights of property,' 'mischievous agitators,' 'spirit of the Const.i.tution,' 'insults to the flag,' and so on, by examining statistical facts as to the numerical proportion, the income, the hours of work, and the death rate from disease, of the various cla.s.ses and races who inhabited the British Empire.

But as a complete science of politics Benthamism is no longer possible.

Pleasure and pain are indeed facts about human nature, but they are not the only facts which are important to the politician. The Benthamites, by straining the meaning of words, tried to cla.s.sify such motives as instinctive impulse, ancient tradition, habit, or personal and racial idiosyncrasy as being forms of pleasure and pain. But they failed; and the search for a basis of valid political reasoning has to begin again, among a generation more conscious than were Bentham and his disciples of the complexity of the problem, and less confident of absolute success.

In that search one thing at least is becoming clear. We must aim at finding as many relevant and measurable facts about human nature as possible, and we must attempt to make all of them serviceable in political reasoning. In collecting, that is to say, the material for a political science, we must adopt the method of the biologist, who tries to discover how many common qualities can be observed and measured in a group of related beings, rather than that of the physicist, who constructs, or used to construct, a science out of a single quality common to the whole material world.

The facts when collected must, because they are many, be arranged. I believe that it would be found convenient by the political student to arrange them under three main heads: descriptive facts as to the human type; quant.i.tative facts as to inherited variations from that type observed either in individuals or groups of individuals; and facts, both quant.i.tative and descriptive, as to the environment into which men are born, and the observed effect of that environment upon their political actions and impulses.

A medical student already attempts to master as many as possible of those facts about the human type that are relevant to his science. The descriptive facts, for instance, of typical human anatomy alone which he has to learn before he can hope to pa.s.s his examinations must number many thousands. If he is to remember them so that he can use them in practice, they must be carefully arranged in a.s.sociated groups. He may find, for instance, that he remembers the anatomical facts about the human eye most easily and correctly by a.s.sociating them with their evolutionary history, or the facts about the bones of the hand by a.s.sociating them with the visual image of a hand in an X-ray photograph.

The quant.i.tative facts as to variations from the anatomical human type are collected for him in statistical form, and he makes an attempt to acquire the main facts as to hygienic environment when and if he takes the Diploma of Public Health.