III
There was still another weakness that characterized all the partisan utopias of the nineteenth century. That weakness was their externalism.
If the medieval thinkers were convinced that, on the whole, nothing could be done to rectify men’s institutions, while men themselves were so easily bitten by corruption, their successors in the nineteenth century committed the opposite kind of error and absurdity: they believed that human nature was unsocial and obstreperous only because the church, the state, or the institution of property perverted every human impulse. Men like Rousseau, Bentham, Godwin, Fourier, and Owen might be miles apart from one another in their criticism of society, but there was an underlying consensus in their belief in human nature. They looked upon human institutions as altogether external to men; these were so many straitjackets that cunning rulers had thrown over the community to make sane and kindly people behave like madmen; and they could conceive of changing the institutions without changing the habits and redirecting the impulses of the people by whom and for whom they had been created. If one devised neat political constitutions, with plenty of checks and balances, or laid out pauper colonies and invited the countryside to make use of them—well, all would be to the good.
There was, it is true, one great exception to this notion that institutions might be reformed without, in that process, making over men. I refer to the belief in education which accompanied these classic criticisms of human institutions; for this seems to point to a perception that men needed a special training and discipline before they could enter freely into the life of a reconstituted community. But upon examination, this exception melts away. The emphasis in the new programs of education was upon the formal, institutional acquirement of the apparatus of knowledge; and they, too, began with the clean slate of a new generation, whereas the critical difficulty was that of getting the adult community sufficiently educated, in a realistic sense, to be able to make over its educational institutions; and in this respect the reformers were just as much in Cuckooland as—well, Campanella. So it follows that the Country House and Coketown shared honors in building up the new educational organizations; and the outcome of the sort of education that the public school and college provided was to make these redoubtable utopias practically unassailable.
Besides, there were the adults: consider Robert Owen!
Robert Owen, one of the most sanguine advocates of popular education, was himself a living example of the need for a different kind of discipline than his narrow and homiletic mind, with its childish interpretation of religious belief and its equally childish rationalism, was capable of framing. No one ever frustrated so many good ideas, from the plan of garden cities down to the project for cooperative production than this same Owen, whose bumptiousness, arrogance, and conceit were bound to provoke reactions in other people which would have defeated the plans of Omnipotence itself. The capital program was to get any sort of social improvement in a world that was full of refractory Owens. A locomotive may, in a sense, be a more perfect thing than the man who made it; but no social order can be better than the human beings who take part in it; for whereas the locomotive can stand apart from its operatives and perform all its functions effectively even if the workers themselves are deficient in every other respect than mechanics, with a social order the product and the producer continue to be one.
Not merely does a community need a Buddha, let us say, before it can produce Buddhism; it needs a whole succession of Buddhas if the religion itself is not to fritter away into the hideous ecclesiastical grind it became in Tibet. This principle has a general application. The social critics of the last century confused the mechanical problem of transforming an institution or of creating a new organization with the personal and social problem of spurring people to effect the transformation and see it through. Their tactics were those of a general who would go into battle without training his army; their strategy was that of the demagogue who talks of a million armed men springing up overnight. The personal problem, the problem of education, was as easy as that!
If we are to account for the poverty of our achievements in renovating the community, in contrast with the enormous amount of quite justifiable economic and political agitation, research, and criticism, it is perhaps not altogether fair to put the entire burden of failure upon the partisan’s lopsided utopia. The plans of our reformers have indeed been weak and jerrybuilt in themselves; but that is not all. What has perhaps been even more conspicuously lacking has been people who are accessible to the existing knowledge, people whose minds have been trained to play freely with the facts, people who have learned the fine and exacting art of cooperating with their fellows; people who are as critical of their own mental processes and habits of behavior as they are of the institutions they wish to alter. As Viola Paget says: “The bulk of thinking and feeling intended to help on human improvement has not really been good enough for the purpose. Not good enough in the sense of not sufficiently impersonal and disciplined.”
Between our programs, our utopias, and their fulfillment there has usually dropped a thick veil of personalities; and were the plan itself the collaborate product of the best minds of the race; as Mr. H. G. Wells satirically pictured in Boon, it would still have to take its chances with the wild asses of the devil that human weakness, apathy, greed, lust for power, might release. Walt Whitman said of Carlyle that behind the tally of his work and genius stood the stomach, and gave a sort of casting vote. So one may say of every social movement, that behind the tally of its theoretic background and its concrete programs stand human beings—hale and sick, neurotic and stable, well-intentioned and malicious—and give the casting vote.
Anyone who has read an important book, and then met the author, who has respected an apparently significant social movement, and then met the leaders behind the scenes, will realize how frequent is the difficulty of reconciling theoretic agreement with the inaccessibilities and prejudices and repugnances of particular personalities. No one can join the work of even the most trivial sort of committee—be it a delegation to shake hands with the Congressman or a body designated to revise the rules of a tennis club—without discovering how the work in hand is perpetually being balked and diverted by the play of personalities.
It is not a little significant that popular speech gives the word “personalities” a derogatory meaning. Again and again the success or failure in large collaborations hinges upon human factors that have no bearing on the question at issue. Pope’s satiric words about wretches hanging that jurymen may dine touches the point neatly. Our programs for reconstruction that have not reckoned with the perpetual cussedness of human nature and have no method for exorcising are as shallow as those older theologies which sought to make men live in grace without altering the social order in which they functioned. Perhaps they could learn something from the story of that ancient agitator who cured the blind, the maimed, the sick, and the halt before he bade them enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Emerson well said in his essay on “Man the Reformer” that it was stupid to expect any real or permanent change from any social program which was unable to regenerate or convert—these are religious phases for a common psychological phenomenon—the people who are to engineer it and carry it through.
It would be so easy, this business of making over the world, if it were only a matter of creating machinery. There has probably never been lacking the sort of energy and talent that is needed for this sort of work; and at any rate, during the last three centuries, with the growth of technology, the mechanical services at the command of our engineers and organizers are huge and adequate. Unfortunately, we are still in the same ditch that Carlyle mordantly pointed out in his essay on Characteristics: Given a world of knaves, we are trying by various cunning devices to produce an honesty from their united action. I do not share Carlyle’s contempt for human nature in the raw, but he is quite right, I believe, in making fun of the superficiality of our partisan utopias. These utopias were so concerned to alter the shell of the community’s institutions that they neglected to pay attention to the habits of the creature itself—or its habitat. That is why mechanical devices play such an important part, perhaps, in all these utopias, from Jeremy Bentham, with his Panopticon method of reforming criminals, down to the hideous cog-and-wheel utopia of Edward Bellamy.
The conceptions of human life that our reforming groups have had have been pretty thin and unsatisfying. Any adequate conception of a new social order would, it seems to me, include the scenery, the actors, and the play. It is a mark of our immaturity that we never seem able to get beyond the scene shifting. Our social theorists, in so far as they consider the actors at all, are inclined to treat them as mechanical puppets. As for the play itself—the universal drama of courtship and trial and adventure and contest and achievement, in which every human being is potentially the hero or heroine—the play itself has hardly entered into their consciousness. Their values have not been human values: they have been such values as have been authenticated by commerce and industry, values such as efficiency, fair wages, and whatnot. These, at any rate, have been the immediate objects of effort, and if human values hung vaguely in the background, they were to be realized in a distant and unascertainable future. So one often feels that no matter how base and deteriorated the modern community is, it nevertheless retains in its totality a greater measure of human values than many of the groups that have attacked its inadequacy have to offer.
All this comes out pretty plainly in the attitude of the labor groups towards the current situation. Whether they are organized for political action or for industrial warfare, their aims are curiously similar. In the very act of contending against the present order, they have accepted the ends for which that order stands and have been content to demand simply that they be universalized. This perhaps accounts for the essential uncreativeness of the labor movement. By a revolution they do not mean a transvaluation of values: they mean a dilution and spreading out of established practices and institutions. There may indeed be plenty of excuse for this attitude in any particular situation—a group of unorganized and semi-destitute workers such as those in many American steel plants—but the worst of it is that this attitude characterizes the more advanced and economically secure groups, and creeps into such ultimate programs as one can deduce from attempts to create workers’ educational institutions—as if a change in ownership or the balance of power would alter the face of Coketown so that its fires would no longer burn and its cinders no longer smut.
I have emphasized what is the weakness, as it seems to me, of the labor movement; not because I am necessarily out of sympathy with any particular measure that might be proposed, but because it illustrates upon an enormous scale the point which I desire to make. The prohibition movement, or the charity organization movement—towards both of which I feel, on the contrary, a cordial antipathy—would serve just as well for illustration; for they all have this common distinction: they lack any explicit, consciously projected humane ends which would make any particular measure that they might offer justified.