The Life of Reason Part 18

Such a.s.sertions, coming from lordly lips, have a suspicious optimism about them; yet the faithful slave, such as the nurse we find in the tragedies, may sometimes have corresponded to that description. In other regions it is surely true that to advance in conventional station would often entail a loss in true dignity and happiness. It would seldom benefit a musician to be appointed admiral or a housemaid to become a prima donna. Scientific breeding might conceivably develop much more sharply the various temperaments and faculties needed in the state; and then each caste or order of citizens would not be more commonly dissatisfied with its lot than men or women now are with their s.e.x. One tribe would run errands as persistently as the ants; another would sing like the lark; a third would show a devil's innate fondness for stoking a fiery furnace.

[Sidenote: Its falsity.]

Aristocracy logically involves castes. But such castes as exist in India, and the social cla.s.ses we find in the western world, are not now based on any profound difference in race, capacity, or inclination. They are based probably on the chances of some early war, reinforced by custom and perpetuated by inheritance. A certain circulation, corresponding in part to proved ability or disability, takes place in the body politic, and, since the French Revolution, has taken place increasingly. Some, by energy and perseverance, rise from the bottom; some, by ill fortune or vice, fall from the top. But these readjustments are insignificant in comparison with the social inertia that perpetuates all the cla.s.ses, and even such s.h.i.+fts as occur at once re-establish artificial conditions for the next generation. As a rule, men's station determines their occupation without their gifts determining their station. Thus stifled ability in the lower orders, and apathy or pampered incapacity in the higher, unite to deprive society of its natural leaders.

[Sidenote: Feeble individuality the rule.]

It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such artificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be charged to the oppressive influence of circ.u.mstances crus.h.i.+ng the individual soul. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career, first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of racial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.

But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as Schopenhauer said, _Fabrikwaaren der Natur_.

Variety in human dreams, like personality among savages, may indeed be inwardly very great, but it is not efficacious. To be socially important and expressible in some common medium, initial differences in temper must be organised into custom and become c.u.mulative by being imitated and enforced. The only artists who can show great originality are those trained in distinct and established schools; for originality and genius must be largely fed and raised on the shoulders of some old tradition. A rich organisation and heritage, while they predetermine the core of all possible variations, increase their number, since every advance opens up new vistas; and growth, in extending the periphery of the substance organised, multiplies the number of points at which new growths may begin. Thus it is only in recent times that discoveries in science have been frequent, because natural science until lately possessed no settled method and no considerable fund of acquired truths. So, too, in political society, statesmans.h.i.+p is made possible by traditional policies, generals.h.i.+p by military inst.i.tutions, great financiers by established commerce.

If we ventured to generalise these observations we might say that such an unequal distribution of capacity as might justify aristocracy should be looked for only in civilised states. Savages are born free and equal, but wherever a complex and highly specialised environment limits the loose freedom of those born into it, it also stimulates their capacity.

Under forced culture remarkable growths will appear, bringing to light possibilities in men which might, perhaps, not even have been possibilities had they been left to themselves; for mulberry leaves do not of themselves develop into brocade. A certain personal idiosyncrasy must be a.s.sumed at bottom, else cotton damask would be as good as silk and all men having like opportunities would be equally great. This idiosyncrasy is brought out by social pressure, while in a state of nature it might have betrayed itself only in trivial and futile ways, as it does among barbarians.

[Sidenote: Sophistical envy.]

Distinction is thus in one sense artificial, since it cannot become important or practical unless a certain environment gives play to individual talent and preserves its originality; but distinction nevertheless is perfectly real, and not merely imputed. In vain does the man in the street declare that he, too, could have been a king if he had been born in the purple; for that potentiality does not belong to him as he is, but only as he might have been, if _per impossibile_ he had not been himself. There is a strange metaphysical illusion in imagining that a man might change his parents, his body, his early environment, and yet retain his personality. In its higher faculties his personality is produced by his special relations. If Shakespeare had been born in Italy he might, if you will, have been a great poet, but Shakespeare he could never have been. Nor can it be called an injustice to all of us who are not Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth's time that Shakespeare had that advantage and was thereby enabled to exist.

The sense of injustice at unequal opportunities arises only when the two environments compared are really somewhat a.n.a.logous, so that the illusion of a change of roles without a change of characters may retain some colour. It was a just insight, for instance, in the Christian fable to make the first rebel against G.o.d the chief among the angels, the spirit occupying the position nearest to that which he tried to usurp.

Lucifer's fallacy consisted in thinking natural inequality artificial.

His perversity lay in rebelling against himself and rejecting the happiness proper to his nature. This was the maddest possible way of rebelling against his true creator; for it is our particular finitude that creates us and makes us be. No one, except in wilful fancy, would envy the peculiar advantages of a whale or an ant, of an Inca or a Grand Lama. An exchange of places with such remote beings would too evidently leave each creature the very same that it was before; for after a nominal exchange of places each office would remain filled and no trace of a change would be perceptible. But the penny that one man finds and another misses would not, had fortune been reversed, have trans.m.u.ted each man into the other. So advent.i.tious a circ.u.mstance seems easily transferable without undermining that personal distinction which it had come to embitter. Yet the incipient fallacy lurking even in such suppositions becomes obvious when we inquire whether so blind an accident, for instance, as s.e.x is also advent.i.tious and ideally transferable and whether Jack and Jill, remaining themselves, could have exchanged genders.

What extends these invidious comparisons beyond all tolerable bounds is the generic and vague nature proper to language and its terms. The first personal p.r.o.noun "I" is a concept so thoroughly universal that it can accompany any experience whatever, yet it is used to designate an individual who is really definable not by the formal selfhood which he shares with every other thinker, but by the special events that make up his life. Each man's memory embraces a certain field, and if the landscape open to his vision is sad and hateful he naturally wishes it to s.h.i.+ft and become like that paradise in which, as he fancies, other men dwell. A legitimate rebellion against evil in his own experience becomes an unthinkable supposition about what his experience might have been had _he_ enjoyed those other men's opportunities or even (so far can unreason wander) had _he_ possessed their character. The wholly different creature, a replica of that envied ideal, which would have existed in that case would still have called itself "I"; and so, the dreamer imagines, that creature would have been himself in a different situation.

If a new birth could still be called by a man's own name, the reason would be that the concrete faculties now present in him are the basis for the ideal he throws out, and if these particular faculties came to fruition in a new being, he would call that being himself, inasmuch as it realised his ideal. The poorer the reality, therefore, the meaner and vaguer the ideal it is able to project. Man is so tied to his personal endowment (essential to him though an accident in the world) that even his uttermost ideal, into which he would fly out of himself and his finitude, can be nothing but the fulfilment of his own initial idiosyncrasies. Whatever other wills and other glories may exist in heaven lie not within his universe of aspiration. Even his most perversely metaphysical envy can begrudge to others only what he instinctively craves for himself.

[Sidenote: Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.]

It is not mere inequality, therefore, that can be a reproach to the aristocratic or theistic ideal. Could each person fulfil his own nature the most striking differences in endowment and fortune would trouble n.o.body's dreams. The true reproach to which aristocracy and theism are open is the thwarting of those unequal natures and the consequent suffering imposed on them all. Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate. A bruised child wailing in the street, his small world for the moment utterly black and cruel before him, does not fetch his unhappiness from sophisticated comparisons or irrational envy; nor can any compensations and celestial harmonies supervening later ever expunge or justify that moment's bitterness. The pain may be whistled away and forgotten; the mind may be rendered by it only a little harder, a little coa.r.s.er, a little more secretive and sullen and familiar with unrightable wrong. But ignoring that pain will not prevent its having existed; it must remain for ever to trouble G.o.d's omniscience and be a part of that h.e.l.l which the creation too truly involves.

[Sidenote: Mutilation by crowding.]

The same curse of suffering vitiates Agrippa's ingenious parable and the joyful humility of Dante's celestial friends, and renders both equally irrelevant to human conditions. Nature may arrange her hierarchies as she chooses and make her creatures instrumental to one another's life.

That interrelation is no injury to any part and an added beauty in the whole. It would have been a truly admirable arrangement to have enabled every living being, in attaining its own end, to make the attainments of the others' ends possible to them also. An approach to such an equilibrium has actually been reached in some respects by the rough sifting of miscellaneous organisms until those that were compatible alone remained. But nature, in her haste to be fertile, wants to produce everything at once, and her distracted industry has brought about terrible confusion and waste and terrible injustice. She has been led to punish her ministers for the services they render and her favourites for the honours they receive. She has imposed suffering on her creatures together with life; she has defeated her own objects and vitiated her bounty by letting every good do harm and bring evil in its train to some unsuspecting creature.

This oppression is the moral stain that attaches to aristocracy and makes it truly unjust. Every privilege that imposes suffering involves a wrong. Not only does aristocracy lay on the world a tax in labour and privation that its own splendours, intellectual and worldly, may arise, but by so doing it infects intelligence and grandeur with inhumanity and renders corrupt and odious that pre-eminence which should have been divine. The lower cla.s.ses, in submitting to the hards.h.i.+p and meanness of their lives--which, to be sure, might have been harder and meaner had no aristocracy existed--must upbraid their fellow-men for profiting by their ill fortune and therefore having an interest in perpetuating it.

Instead of the brutal but innocent injustice of nature, what they suffer from is the sly injustice of men; and though the suffering be less--for the worst of men is human--the injury is more sensible. The inclemencies and dangers men must endure in a savage state, in scourging them, would not have profited by that cruelty. But suffering has an added sting when it enables others to be exempt from care and to live like the G.o.ds in irresponsible ease; the inequality which would have been innocent and even beautiful in a happy world becomes, in a painful world, a bitter wrong, or at best a criminal beauty.

[Sidenote: A hint to optimists.]

It would be a happy relief to the aristocrat's conscience, when he possesses one, could he learn from some yet bolder Descartes that common people were nothing but _betes-machines_, and that only a groundless prejudice had hitherto led us to suppose that life could exist where evidently nothing good could be attained by living. If all unfortunate people could be proved to be unconscious automata, what a brilliant justification that would be for the ways of both G.o.d and man! Philosophy would not lack arguments to support such an agreeable conclusion.

Beginning with the axiom that whatever is is right, a metaphysician might adduce the truth that consciousness is something self-existent and indubitably real; therefore, he would contend, it must be self-justifying and indubitably good. And he might continue by saying that a slave's life was not its own excuse for being, nor were the labours of a million drudges otherwise justified than by the conveniences which they supplied their masters with. _Ergo_, those servile operations could come to consciousness only where they attained their end, and the world could contain nothing but perfect and universal happiness. A divine omniscience and joy, shared by finite minds in so far as they might attain perfection, would be the only life in existence, and the notion that such a thing as pain, sorrow, or hatred could exist at all would forthwith vanish like the hideous and ridiculous illusion that it was. This argument may be recommended to apologetic writers as no weaker than those they commonly rely on, and infinitely more consoling.

[Sidenote: How aristocracies might do good.]

But so long as people remain on what such an invaluable optimist might call the low level of sensuous thought, and so long as we imagine that we exist and suffer, an aristocratic regimen can only be justified by radiating benefit and by proving that were less given to those above less would be attained by those beneath them. Such reversion of benefit might take a material form, as when, by commercial guidance and military protection, a greater net product is secured to labour, even after all needful taxes have been levied upon it to support greatness. An industrial and political oligarchy might defend itself on that ground.

Or the return might take the less positive form of opportunity, as it does when an aristocratic society has a democratic government. Here the people neither accept guidance nor require protection; but the existence of a rich and irresponsible cla.s.s offers them an ideal, such as it is, in their ambitious struggles. For they too may grow rich, exercise financial ascendancy, educate their sons like gentlemen, and launch their daughters into fas.h.i.+onable society. Finally, if the only aristocracy recognised were an aristocracy of achievement, and if public rewards followed personal merit, the reversion to the people might take the form of partic.i.p.ation by them in the ideal interests of eminent men.

Holiness, genius, and knowledge can reverberate through all society. The fruits of art and science are in themselves cheap and not to be monopolised or consumed in enjoyment. On the contrary, their wider diffusion stimulates their growth and makes their cultivation more intense and successful. When an ideal interest is general the share which falls to the private person is the more apt to be efficacious. The saints have usually had companions, and artists and philosophers have flourished in schools.

At the same time ideal goods cannot be a.s.similated without some training and leisure. Like education and religion they are degraded by popularity, and reduced from what the master intended to what the people are able and willing to receive. So pleasing an idea, then, as this of diffused ideal possessions has little application in a society aristocratically framed; for the greater eminence the few attain the less able are the many to follow them. Great thoughts require a great mind and pure beauties a profound sensibility. To attempt to give such things a wide currency is to be willing to denaturalise them in order to boast that they have been propagated. Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and n.o.ble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean. These alternatives can never be eluded until some purified and high-bred race succeeds the promiscuous bipeds that now blacken the planet.

[Sidenote: Man adds wrong to nature's injury.]

Aristocracy, like everything else, has no practical force save that which mechanical causes endow it with. Its privileges are fruits of inevitable advantages. Its oppressions are simply new forms and vehicles for nature's primeval cruelty, while the benefits it may also confer are only further examples of her nice equilibrium and necessary harmony. For it lies in the essence of a mechanical world, where the interests of its products are concerned, to be fundamentally kind, since it has formed and on the whole maintains those products, and yet continually cruel, since it forms and maintains them blindly, without considering difficulties or probable failures. Now the most tyrannical government, like the best, is a natural product maintained by an equilibrium of natural forces. It is simply a new mode of mechanical energy to which the philosopher living under it must adjust himself as he would to the weather. But when the vehicle of nature's inclemency is a heartless man, even if the harm done be less, it puts on a new and a moral aspect. The source of injury is then not only natural but criminal as well, and the result is a sense of wrong added to misfortune. It must needs be that offence come, but woe to him by whom the offence cometh. He justly arouses indignation and endures remorse.

[Sidenote: Conditions of a just inequality.]

Now civilisation cannot afford to entangle its ideals with the causes of remorse and of just indignation. In the first place nature in her slow and ponderous way levels her processes and rubs off her sharp edges by perpetual friction. Where there is maladjustment there is no permanent physical stability. Therefore the ideal of society can never involve the infliction of injury on anybody for any purpose. Such an ideal would propose for a goal something out of equilibrium, a society which even if established could not maintain itself; but an ideal life must not tend to destroy its ideal by abolis.h.i.+ng its own existence. In the second place, it is impossible on moral grounds that injustice should subsist in the ideal. The ideal means the perfect, and a supposed ideal in which wrong still subsisted would be the denial of perfection. The ideal state and the ideal universe should be a family where all are not equal, but where all are happy. So that an aristocratic or theistic system in order to deserve respect must discard its sinister apologies for evil and clearly propose such an order of existences, one superposed upon the other, as should involve no suffering on any of its levels. The services required of each must involve no injury to any; to perform them should be made the servant's spontaneous and specific ideal. The privileges the system bestows on some must involve no outrage on the rest, and must not be paid for by mutilating other lives or thwarting their natural potentialities. For the humble to give their labour would then be blessed in reality, and not merely by imputation, while for the great to receive those benefits would be blessed also, not in fact only but in justice.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote C: Paradiso. Canto III., 70-87.]

CHAPTER V

DEMOCRACY

[Sidenote: Democracy as an end and as a means.]

[Sidenote: Natural democracy leads to monarchy.]

The word democracy may stand for a natural social equality in the body politic or for a const.i.tutional form of government in which power lies more or less directly in the people's hands. The former may be called social democracy and the latter democratic government. The two differ widely, both in origin and in moral principle. Genetically considered, social democracy is something primitive, unintended, proper to communities where there is general competence and no marked personal eminence. It is the democracy of Arcadia, Switzerland, and the American pioneers. Such a community might be said to have also a democratic government, for everything in it is naturally democratic. There will be no aristocracy, no prestige; but instead an intelligent readiness to lend a hand and to do in unison whatever is done, not so much under leaders as by a kind of conspiring instinct and contagious sympathy. In other words, there will be that most democratic of governments--no government at all. But when pressure of circ.u.mstances, danger, or inward strife makes recognised and prolonged guidance necessary to a social democracy, the form its government takes is that of a rudimentary monarchy, established by election or general consent. A natural leader presents himself and he is instinctively obeyed. He may indeed be freely criticised and will not be screened by any pomp or traditional mystery; he will be easy to replace and every citizen will feel himself radically his equal. Yet such a state is at the beginnings of monarchy and aristocracy, close to the stage depicted in Homer, where pre-eminences are still obviously natural, although already over-emphasised by the force of custom and wealth, and by the fission of society into divergent cla.s.ses.

[Sidenote: Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.]

Political democracy, on the other hand, is a late and artificial product. It arises by a gradual extension of aristocratic privileges, through rebellion against abuses, and in answer to restlessness on the people's part. Its principle is not the absence of eminence, but the discovery that existing eminence is no longer genuine and representative. It is compatible with a very complex government, great empire, and an aristocratic society; it may retain, as notably in England and in all ancient republics, many vestiges of older and less democratic inst.i.tutions. For under democratic governments the people have not created the state; they merely control it. Their suspicions and jealousies are quieted by a.s.signing to them a voice, perhaps only a veto, in the administration; but the state administered is a prodigious self-created historical engine. Popular votes never established the family, private property, religious practices, or international frontiers. Inst.i.tutions, ideals, and administrators may all be such as the popular cla.s.ses could never have produced; but these products of natural aristocracy are suffered to subsist so long as no very urgent protest is raised against them. The people's liberty consists not in their original responsibility for what exists--for they are guiltless of it--but merely in the faculty they have acquired of abolis.h.i.+ng any detail that may distress or wound them, and of imposing any new measure, which, seen against the background of existing laws, may commend itself from time to time to their instinct and mind.

[Sidenote: Ideals and expedients.]

If we turn from origins to ideals, the contrast between social and political democracy is no less marked. Social democracy is a general ethical ideal, looking to human equality and brotherhood, and inconsistent, in its radical form, with such inst.i.tutions as the family and hereditary property. Democratic government, on the contrary, is merely a means to an end, an expedient for the better and smoother government of certain states at certain junctures. It involves no special ideals of life; it is a question of policy, namely, whether the general interest will be better served by granting all men (and perhaps all women) an equal voice in elections. For political democracy, arising in great and complex states, must necessarily be a government by deputy, and the questions actually submitted to the people can be only very large rough matters of general policy or of confidence in party leaders.

We may now add a few reflections about each kind of democracy, regarding democratic government chiefly in its origin and phases (for its function is that of all government) and social democracy chiefly as an ideal, since its origin is simply that of society itself.

[Sidenote: Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if rational, would serve common interests.]

The possibility of intelligent selfishness and the prevalence of a selfishness far from intelligent unite to make men wary in intrusting their interests to one another's keeping. If pa.s.sion never overcame prudence, and if private prudence always counselled what was profitable also to others, no objection could arise to an aristocratic policy. For if we a.s.sume a certain variety in endowments and functions among men, it would evidently conduce to the general convenience that each man should exercise his powers uncontrolled by the public voice. The government, having facilities for information and ready resources, might be left to determine all matters of policy; for its members' private interests would coincide with those of the public, and even if prejudices and irrational habits prevented them from pursuing their own advantage, they would surely not err more frequently or more egregiously in that respect than would the private individual, to whose ignorant fancy every decision would otherwise have to be referred.

Thus in monarchy every expedient is seized upon to render the king's and the country's interests coincident; public prosperity fills his treasury, the arts adorn his court, justice rendered confirms his authority. If reason were efficacious kings might well be left to govern alone. Theologians, under the same hypothesis, might be trusted to draw up creeds and codes of morals; and, in fact, everyone with a gift for management or creation might be authorised to execute his plans. It is in this way, perhaps, that some social animals manage their affairs, for they seem to co-operate without external control. That their instinctive system is far from perfect we may safely take for granted; but government, too, is not always adequate or wise. What spoils such a spontaneous harmony is that people neither understand their own interests nor have the constancy to pursue them systematically; and further, that their personal or animal interests may actually clash, in so far as they have not been harmonised by reason.

To rationalise an interest is simply to correlate it with every other interest which it at all affects. In proportion as rational interests predominate in a man and he esteems rational satisfactions above all others, it becomes impossible that he should injure another by his action, and unnecessary that he should sacrifice himself. But the worse and more brutal his nature is, and the less satisfaction he finds in justice, the more need he has to do violence to himself, lest he should be doing it to others. This is the reason why preaching, conscious effort, and even education are such feeble agencies for moral reform: only selection and right breeding could produce that genuine virtue which would not need to find goodness unpalatable nor to say, in expressing its own perversities, that a distaste for excellence is a condition of being good. But when a man is ill-begotten and foolish, and hates the means to his own happiness, he naturally is not well fitted to secure that of other people. Those who suffer by his folly are apt to think him malicious, whereas he is the first to suffer himself and knows that it was the force of circ.u.mstances and a certain pathetic helplessness in his own soul that led him into his errors.

[Sidenote: People jealous of eminence.]

These errors, when they are committed by a weak and pa.s.sionate ruler, are not easily forgiven. His subjects attribute to him an intelligence he probably lacks; they call him treacherous or cruel when he is very likely yielding to lazy habits and to insidious traditions. They see in every calamity that befalls them a proof that his interests are radically hostile to theirs, whereas it is only his conduct that is so.