Progress and History Part 8

[45] Ibid., pp. 213, 121, 562, 691.

[46] _Conf._ x, 13, 2.

[47] Autumn, 387.

[48] _Conf._ 1, 6, 3; x, 27; x, 20.

[49] _Conf._ xi, 13.

[50] _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen_, 1912, pp.

263-5.

[51] _De Fide_, Disp. xix, 7, 10; xx, 107, 194.

[52] _Cognosci Te Stesso_, 1912, pp. 144-7.

VI

MORAL PROGRESS

L. P. JACKS

From the syllabus of all the lectures in this course I gather that every lecturer on the programme is dealing with the question of moral progress. This is inevitable. Each lecturer must show that the particular sort of progress he is dealing with is real or genuine progress, and this it cannot be unless it is moral. That is itself a significant fact and throws a valuable light on our subject. It shows that progress, as it is studied throughout the course, is not progress in the abstract, whatever that may mean, but progress _for us_ const.i.tuted as we are; and since our const.i.tution is essentially moral all progress that we can recognize as such must be moral also. Science, Industry, Government, might all claim progress on their own ground and in their own nature, but this would not prove progress as we understand the word, unless it could be shown further that these things contribute to human betterment in the highest sense of the word. _Their_ progress might conceivably involve _our_ regress.

To believe in moral progress as an historical fact, as a process that has begun, and is going on, and will be continued--that is one thing, and it is my own position. To believe that this progress is far advanced is another thing, and is not my position. While believing in Moral Progress as a fact, I also believe that we are much nearer to the beginnings of it than the end. We should do well to accustom ourselves to this thought. Many of our despairs, lamentations, and pessimisms are disappointments which arise from our extravagant notions of the degree of progress already attained. There has been a great deal of what I have called philosophic pharisaism. Perhaps it would be better called aeonic pharisaism. I mean the spirit in the present age which seems to say 'I thank thee, O G.o.d, that I am not as former ages: ignorant, barbaric, cruel, unsocial; I read books, ride in aeroplanes, eat my dinner with a knife and fork, and cheerfully pay my taxes to the State; I study human science, talk freely about humanity, and spend much of my time in making speeches on social questions'. Now there is truth in all this, but not the kind of truth which should lead us to self-flattery. A good rule for optimists would be this: 'Believe in moral progress, but do not believe in too much of it.' I think there would be more optimists in the world, more cheerfulness, more belief in moral progress, if we candidly faced the fact that morally considered we are still in a neolithic age, not brutes indeed any longer, and yet not so far outgrown the brutish stage as to justify these trumpetings. One of the beneficent lessons of the present war has been to moderate our claims in this respect. It has revealed us to ourselves as nothing else in history has ever done, and it has revealed, among other things, that moral progress is not nearly so advanced as we thought it was. It has been a terrible blow to the pharisaism of which I have just spoken. It has not discredited science, nor philosophy, nor government, nor anything else that we value, but it has shown that these things have not brought us as far as we thought.

That very knowledge, when you come to think of it, is itself a very distinct step in moral progress. Before the war we were growing morally conceited; we thought ourselves much better, more advanced in morality, than we really were, and this conceit was acting as a real barrier to our farther advance. A sharp lesson was needed to take this conceit out of us--to remind us that as yet we are only at the bare beginnings of moral advance--and not, as some of us fondly imagined, next door to the goal. This sudden awakening to the truth is full of promise for the future.

And now what is the cause of these exaggerated notions which so many of us have entertained? I think they arise from our habit of letting ourselves be guided by words rather than by realities, by what men are _saying_ rather than by what they are _doing_, by what teachers are teaching than by what learners are learning. If you take your stand in the realm of words, of doctrines, of theories, of philosophies, of books, preachings, and uttered ideals, you might make out a strong case for a high degree of moral progress actually attained. But if you ask how much of this has been learnt by mankind at large, and learnt in such a way as to issue in practice, you get a different story. We have attached too much importance to the first story and too little to the second. There has been a great deal of false emphasis in consequence.

This false emphasis is especially prominent in the education controversy which is now going on--and the question of moral progress, by the way, is the question of education in the widest and highest sense of the term. People seem quite content so long as they can get the right thing taught. They don't always see that unless the right thing is taught by the right people and in the right way it will not be _learnt_. Now education is ultimately a question of what is being _learnt_, not of what is being _taught_. The process of learning is a very curious and complicated one, and it often happens that what goes in at the teacher's end comes out at the pupil's end in a wholly different form and with a wholly different value; and we have the highest authority for believing that what really counts is not so much that which goeth into a man but that which cometh out of him. That applies to all education--especially moral education. So that if you argue from what has gone into the human race in the way of moral teaching you may be greatly surprised and perhaps disappointed when you compare it with what has come out of the human race in the meantime. What has been taught is not what has been learnt. It has suffered a sea change in the process. Nor is the question wholly one of learning. There is the further question of remembering. I believe that a candid examination of the facts would convince us that the human race has proved itself a forgetful pupil. It has not always retained what it has learnt. Emerson has said that no account of the Holy Ghost has been lost. But how did Emerson find that out? The only accents Emerson knew of were those which the world happened to have remembered. If any had been lost in the meantime Emerson naturally would not know of their existence. I have heard of a functionary, whose precise office I am not able to define, called 'the Lord's Remembrancer'. It would be a great help to Moral Progress if we had in modern life a People's Remembrancer. His place is occupied to some extent by the study of history, and for that reason one could wish for the sake of Moral Progress that the study of history were universal. For my own part I seldom open a book of history without recovering what for me is a lost account of the Holy Ghost. Next to conceit I reckon forgetfulness as the greatest enemy of Moral Progress. I suppose Rudyard Kipling had something of this in mind when he wrote his poem--

Lord G.o.d of Hosts be with us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget.

Another cause of our over-estimate of Moral Progress is that we have thought too much of the abstract State and too little of the actual States now in being. Our devotion to 'the' State as an ideal has led us to overlook the fact that many actual States represent a form of morality so low that it is doubtful if it can be called morality at all.

In their relations _with one another_ they display qualities which would disgrace the brutes. And the worst of it is that at times these States drag down to their own low level the morality of the individuals belonging to them. Thus at the present moment we see quite decent Englishmen and quite decent Germans tearing one another to pieces like mad dogs, a thing they would never dream of doing as between man and man, and which they do only because they are in the grip of forces alien to their own nature. We have overestimated Progress by thinking only of what is happening inside each of the States. We have forgotten to consider the bearing of the States to one another, which remains on a level lower than that of individuals.

The impression has gone abroad that the nations of the world need to take _only one step_ from the position where they now stand to accomplish the final unity of all mankind. Taking any one of these nations--our own for example--we can trace the steps by which the warring elements within it have become reconciled, until finally there has emerged that vast unitary corporation--the British Empire. So with all the others. What more is required therefore than one step further in the same direction, to join up all the States into a single world State.

But I am bound to think we are too hasty in treating the unity of mankind as needing only one step more. It is not so easy as all that.

When you study the process by which unity has been brought about in the various European communities you find that motives of conquest and corresponding motives of defence have had a great deal to do with it.

Germany, for example, was built up and now holds together as a fighting unit. Whether Germany and the other States would still maintain their cohesion when they were no longer fighting units, and when the motives of conquest and defence were no longer in operation, is a question on which I should not like to dogmatize either way. Certainly we have no right to a.s.sume offhand that the unifying process which has given the nations the ma.s.s cohesion and efficiency they require for holding their own against enemy States would still remain in full power when there were no longer any enemy States to be considered.

But what do we mean by Progress?

Progress may be defined as that process by which a thing advances from a less to a more complete state of itself. Now whether this process is a desirable one or not obviously depends on the nature of the thing which is progressing. Take the largest and most inclusive of all things--the whole world. And now suppose philosophy to have proved that the world, the whole world, is advancing from a less to a more complete state of itself--which as a matter of fact is what the doctrine of evolution claims to have proved. Ought I to rejoice in this discovery? Will it give me satisfaction? That clearly depends on the nature of the world.

If I am antecedently a.s.sured that the world is good, I shall naturally rejoice on hearing that it is advancing from a less to a more complete state of itself. But if the nature of the world is evil, what reason can I possibly have for rejoicing in its evolution? a.s.suming the world to be evil in its essential nature, I for my part, if I were consulted in the matter, would certainly give my vote against its being allowed to advance from a less to a more complete state of itself. The less such a world progresses the easier it will be for moral beings to live in it.

Our interest lies in its remaining as undeveloped as possible.

Obvious as this seems there are some evolutionists who take a rather different view. They seem to think that any sort of world, no matter what its nature might be, would ultimately become a good world if it were allowed to develop its nature far enough. It is just the fact of its continually becoming more of itself that makes it good. But this would compel us to abandon our definition that progress is the advance of a thing from a less to a more complete state of _itself_. For if itself were a bad self to begin with all such advance of _itself_ would only make it worse. It is possible that an essentially bad man like Iago might be converted into a good one, but not by advancing from a less to a more complete state of _himself_ as he originally was--unless indeed we change the hypothesis and suppose that he was not essentially bad to begin with. So with the world at large. Our nature being what it is, namely moral, we must first be convinced that the world is in principle good before we can derive the least satisfaction from knowing that it is advancing from a less to a more complete state of _itself_. The alternative doctrine makes a breach in the doctrine of progress which is inconsistent with its original form. A thing develops by retaining its essential nature--that is the original form. But a bad world which develops into a good one doesn't retain its essential nature. There comes a point somewhere when the next step of progress can be achieved only by the thing dropping its original nature--a point at which the thing is no longer becoming more of its former self, which was bad, but is ceasing to be its former self altogether and becoming something else, which is good.

Let us apply this to progress in three specific directions--Science, the Mechanical Arts, and Government.

We find that the progress of science has enormously increased man's power over the forces of nature. Is it a good thing that man's power over the forces of nature should be increased? That surely depends on the manner in which this power is used, and this depends again on the moral nature of man. When we observe, as we may truly observe, especially at the present time, that of all the single applications which man has made of science, the most extensive and perhaps the most efficient is that of devising implements for destroying his brother man, it is at least permissible to raise the question whether the progress of science has contributed on the whole to the progress of humanity. Had it not been for the progress of science, which has enormously increased the wealth of the world, it is doubtful if this war, which is mainly a war about wealth, would have taken place at all. Or if a war had broken out, it would not have involved the appalling destruction of human life and property we are now witnessing--such that, within a s.p.a.ce of two years, about six million human beings have been killed, thirty-five millions wounded, and wealth destroyed to the extent of about fifteen thousand millions sterling--though some say it is very much more. Science taught us to make this wealth: science has also taught us how to destroy it.

When one thinks of how much of this is attributable to the progress of science, I say it is _permissible to raise the question_ whether man is a being who can safely be entrusted with that control over the forces of nature which science gives him. What if he uses this power, as he plainly can do, for his own undoing? To ask this, as we can hardly help asking, is to transfer the question of scientific progress into the sphere of morality. It is conceivable that the progress of science might involve for us no progress at all. It might be, and some have feared that it may become, a step towards the self-destruction of the human race.

Take the mechanical arts. The chief effects of progress in the mechanical arts have been an enormous increase in the material wealth of mankind, and, partly consequent upon this, a parallel growth of population in the industrial countries of the world. It is by no means clear that either of these things const.i.tutes a definite step in human progress. Consider the growth of population--the immense increase in the total bulk and volume of the human race. Whether this const.i.tutes a clear gain to humanity obviously cannot be answered without reference to moral considerations. To increase the arithmetical quant.i.ty of life in the world can be counted a gain only if the general tendencies of life are in the right direction. If they are in the wrong direction, then the more lives there are to yield to these tendencies the less reason has the moralist to be satisfied with what is happening. No one, so far as I know, has ever seriously maintained that the end and aim of progress is to increase the number of human beings up to the limit which the planet is able to support; though some doctrines if pressed to their conclusion would lead to that, notably the doctrine that all morality rests ultimately on the instinct for the preservation and the reproduction of life. We have first to be convinced that the human race is not on the wrong road before we can look with complacency on the increase of its numbers. We may note in this connexion that mankind possesses no sort of collective control over its own ma.s.s or volume. The ma.s.s or total number of lives involved is determined by forces which are not subject to the unitary direction of any existing human will either individual or collective. This applies not only to the human race as a whole, but to particular communities. Their growth is unregulated. They just come to be what they are in point of size. This fact seems to me a very important one to bear in mind when we talk of the progress of science giving us control over the forces of nature. So far no state, no government, no community has won any effective control over that group of the forces of nature which determine the total size of the community in question. It is an aspect of human destiny which appears to be left to chance; and yet when we consider what it means, is there any aspect of human destiny on which such tremendous consequences depend? And ought we not to consider this before claiming, as we so often claim, that the progress of science has given us control of the forces of nature? It is strange that this point has not been more considered, especially by thinkers who are fond of the word 'humanity'--'the good of humanity'--or the 'greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Humanity has an arithmetical or quant.i.tative side, and the good of humanity surely depends, to some extent, on how much humanity there is. I can imagine many things which might be good for a Greek city state of 10,000 souls which would not be good, or not good in the same sense, for a community of 100,000,000 souls. Surely it needs no reasoning to prove that our power to do our duty to others is affected by the number of others to whom duty has to be done--it makes a difference where there are 10,000 of men or 100,000,000. Similarly with the greatest happiness of the greatest number. What is the _greatest_ number? A great deal that has been said about this would not have been said if we had considered that the _greatest number_ itself is left at the disposal of forces outside the present scope of our own will. Even the proposal to sell our goods and give the proceeds to the poor would surely be affected, from the moral point of view, by the number of the poor who were to receive the distribution. Were this so small that the poor would get five pounds apiece it would be one question; were it so large that they would receive a halfpenny apiece it would be another question. Thus we may conclude that the progress of the mechanical arts with the consequent increase in the bulk of the human race has not solved the problem of moral progress, but only placed that problem in a new and more perplexing context. A similar conclusion would meet us if we were to consider the parallel increase of the wealth of the world. The moral question is not about the amount of wealth the world possesses, but about the way men spend it and the use they make of it. Industrially speaking, the human race has made its fortune during the last hundred years. But has it made up its mind what to do with the fortune? And has its mind been made up in the right way? To raise these questions is to see that progress from the economic point of view may be the reverse of progress from the moral. But I shall not further enlarge upon this--the theme being too familiar.

The third question which relates itself to moral progress is that of Government. Now Government, I need hardly say, is not an end in itself.

It is a device which man has set up to help him in attaining the true end of his life. To make up our minds how we ought to be governed is therefore impossible unless we have previously made up our minds how we ought to live. What might be a good government for a people whose end is industrial success might be a very bad one for a people who had some other end in view. Well, then, are we well governed at the present time?

Are we better governed than we were? Has progress taken place in this department? Plainly we cannot answer these questions unless we have chosen our end in life and are morally satisfied with it. In the history of modern states we discover a tendency, more strongly marked in some quarters than in others, towards that form of democracy which is called responsible self-government. Government of the people, for the people, by the people. The people are going to govern themselves. But they may do so in a thousand different ways--each of which has a different moral value. A people may go wrong just as fatally in governing itself as in being governed by some external authority. I confess that nothing I can learn from the history of government entirely rea.s.sures me on this point. I see everywhere progress towards organization, but then one is bound to ask on what ulterior end is this organization directed? I see everywhere a growing subordination of the individual to the State. This may or may not be a very good thing. What _kind of State_ is it to which the individual is becoming subordinated? There are great differences among them--some seem to me, one in particular at the present time, thoroughly bad, and I cannot see that the individual gains morally by being subordinated to such a State--at least if he gains in one direction he loses more in another.

Even the social unity which Governments are capable of achieving must not be too hastily translated into moral progress. We are ent.i.tled to ask several questions before the one can be equated with the other. To begin with, do men know what they want to achieve by their unified life?

And if they do know what they want, have we not still the right to criticize its moral value and say 'this is right' or this is wrong?

Should the time ever come when the common will of mankind should get itself expressed by the decrees of a universal democracy, would moral criticism be at an end so far as the said decrees were concerned? For my part I cannot see that it would. Perhaps it were truer to say that only then would moral criticism effectively begin. As things now are, we are prevented from criticizing the common will because none of us knows what exactly the common will demands. But if it could get itself expressed and defined by the decrees of a perfect democracy we should know. Those decrees would reveal the human community to itself, and it is possible that the revelation would not be altogether agreeable to our moral sense. We might then discover that the common will is capable of being grossly immoral. So far it has been impossible for us to make this discovery because no organ exists for expressing the common will on the human scale, and even those which express it on the national scale are not perfect. I am far from saying the discovery would be made; but I know of no line of argument which rules it out as impossible. Meanwhile we are scarcely justified in regarding the common will as necessarily moral until we know more than we do of what precisely it is that the common will aims at and intends to achieve. To back the common will through thick and thin, as some of our philosophers seem disposed to do, is a dangerous speculation--it might perhaps be described as putting your money on a dark horse.

This leads me to say a word concerning a phrase which has been much in use of late--the Collective Wisdom of Mankind, or the Collective Wisdom of the State. Progress is sometimes defined as a gradual approach to a state of things where this collective wisdom rules the course of events.

And collective wisdom is sometimes represented as vastly wiser than that possessed by any individual, even the wisest.

Now if this really is so it seems pretty obvious that, when the collective wisdom speaks, no individual can have the right of appeal.

What are you, what am I, that either of us should set up our private intelligence against the intelligence of forty million of our fellow citizens? That surely would be a preposterous claim. The collective wisdom must know best: at least it knows much better than you or I.

But is the collective wisdom of the State so immensely superior to that of the individual, and of necessity so? Have we any means of bringing the matter to the test? It is extremely difficult to do so. Not until we make the experiment do we find how rare are the occasions of which we can say that then and there the collective wisdom of the community fairly and fully expressed itself. Acts of Parliament are not good examples. They usually represent not the collective wisdom of the whole community, but the wisdom of the majority after it has been checked, modified, and perhaps nullified by the opposing wisdom of an almost equal minority. Take as an example the history of the Irish Question.

How difficult it is to put one's finger on any moment in that tangled story and say that then and there the collective wisdom of the community knew what it wanted to do and did it! So with almost everything else.

Now if there be such a thing as the collective wisdom of the State I suppose that the moment when we are most likely to find it in action is the moment when one State has dealings with another State. That surely is a fair test. If States possess collective wisdom they ought to show its existence and measure when they confront one another _as States_--when State calls to State across the great deeps of international policy. What should we say of any State which claimed collective wisdom only when dealing with its own individual members--with you and me--but dropped the claim when the question was one of reasonable intercourse with another State similarly endowed? This we should say is a very dubious claim.

Well, how stands the matter when this test is applied? The present war provides the answer. The war arose out of a type of quarrel which, had it occurred between half a dozen individuals of average intelligence, would have been amicably settled, by reasonable human intercourse, in twenty minutes. Does not this afford a rough measure of the collective wisdom of such States as at present exist in this world? Does it not suggest that they have little faculty of reasonable intercourse with one another? And when you say _that_ of any being, or any collection of beings, do you not put it pretty low down in the scale of intelligence?

It is literally true that these States do not understand one another.

Thus we are driven back upon a plain alternative; either the States do not represent collective wisdom, or else this collective wisdom is one of the lowest forms of wisdom now extant on this planet. In either case we must be very cautious in our use of the phrase. We must not infer moral progress from the reign of collective wisdom until we are a.s.sured that collective wisdom is really as wise as some of its devotees a.s.sume it to be.

About the idea of moral progress, which is only another name for the idea of progress in its widest form, I need say little, the question having been adequately treated by other lecturers. But I will add this.

Belief in moral progress is a belief which no man can live without, and, at the same time, a belief which cannot be proved by any appeal to human experience. We cannot live without it, because life is just the process of reaching forward to a better form of itself. Were a man to say that since the world began no moral progress has taken place he would thereby show his latent belief in moral progress. For no man would take the trouble to deny moral progress unless he believed that the world would in some way be made better by his denial. He would not even trouble to come to a private conclusion in the matter unless he believed that his private conclusion was something to the good. In that sense perhaps we may say that moral progress is proved, for the best proof of any belief is that it remains indispensable to the life we have to live. But the appeal to experience would not prove it--and for this reason. A progressive world is a world which not only makes gains, but _keeps_ its gains when they are made. If the Kingdom of Heaven were to become a fact to-morrow, that of itself would not prove progress, if you admit the possibility that the world might hereafter retreat from the position it had won. That possibility you could never rule out--except by an appeal to faith. A world which attained the goal and then lost it would be a greater failure, from the point of view of moral progress, than one which never attained the goal at all. The doctrine that the gains of morality can never be lost is widely held; but it does not rest on a philosophic or a scientific basis. As Hume taught long ago, you cannot infer an infinite conclusion from finite data--and in this case the conclusion is infinite and the data are finite. They are not only finite but various: some pointing one way, some another.

Finally we cannot prove moral progress by appeal to any objective standard, such as the amount of happiness existing in the world at successive dates. Suppose you were able to show that, up to date, the amount of happiness in the world has shown a steady increase until it has reached the grand sum total now existing. Now suppose that you were transferred to another planet where the conditions were the exact opposite: where the inhabitants ages ago started with the happiness we now possess, and gradually declined until, at the present moment, they are no happier than the human race was at the first stage of its career.

Now add together the totals of happiness for both your worlds, the ascending world which starts with the minimum and ends with the maximum, the declining world which starts with the maximum and ends with the minimum. The grand totals in both cases are exactly the same. So far as the total result is concerned, the declining world has just as much to show for itself as the ascending. Valued in terms of happiness, the one world would be worth as much as the other.

And yet we know that the value of these two worlds is not the same. The ascending is worth a lot more than the descending. Why? I leave you with that conundrum. Answer it, and you have the key to the meaning of Moral Progress.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, Book III, ch. 3.

Lecky, _History of European Morals_, ch. 1.

Spencer, _Data of Ethics_, ch. 13 to 14.