Chapter VII: Part 7

This is pointed criticism from the inside of a movement whose advanced minds are now beginning to realize that they have envisaged their problems far too simply,--that self-expression is not the magic formula, that psycho-analysis produces as much trouble as it dissolves, that socialized education too much disregards the individual gifted pupil, that liberty is a hard concept to understand aright. The New Humanist on the outside phrases his criticism differently. It is that Dewey offers no contribution to the urgent problem of producing leaders of quality in a democratic society. For the New Humanist makes no fetich of democracy, as does Dewey, nor does he stand for an unmixed aristocracy either. To him the social problem is the blending of the two, the securing of an aristocratic and selective democracy, and he would like to see education from the kindergarten upwards organized for the furtherance of that aim.

* * * * *

Dewey is a Baconian philosopher with an admixture of Rousseauism. I am here making use of the Babbittean classification of modern naturalists into two types, those prefigured by Francis Bacon who are known as scientific naturalists, and those prefigured by Rousseau and known as sentimental naturalists. The classification causes so much resentment among present-day intellectuals, it is so hotly repudiated, that I am led to wonder if Babbitt has not again probed to the bottom of our era’s mind and located basic trends we have not known we were exemplifying. Certainly, his two types, however petty many of the exemplars today may be, are of epical stature. The drama of the last three centuries is no mean one, and requires as its leading characters personages to fit the scale of the action.

Of course, we must discriminate between Babbitt’s estimates of Bacon and Rousseau as personages and his description of the types of men he names after them. In the character of Bacon, for instance, he notes the presence of traditional Christianity and Renascence humanistic elements. Babbitt does not, to my mind, allow sufficiently for the enigmatic in Bacon--hardly any one today is cautious enough for that--and he accounts for the Lord Chancellor’s fall, which is still inexplicable when all is said, on too general grounds. But, to get his types, Babbitt does not simplify either Bacon or Rousseau: he merely extracts from them the large formative elements which released into the world have created the Baconian and the Rousseauist. It is undeniable that Bacon was, in Whitehead’s words, “one of the great builders who constructed the mind of the modern world.” He was the prophet of the Kingdom of Man, Babbitt declares. He foresaw man’s dominion over the earth, he made efficient the impulse to unlock Nature with the keys of Science, he stimulated men to the astounding utilitarian triumphs which the centuries since Bacon have achieved. It was his genius that made the idea of progress so potent.

The Baconians have gone forth and conquered the earth. If most of them lack the slightest touch of Bacon’s dignity as a human being, they nevertheless partake of the majesty of numbers and are not unworthy of a mass-part in a planetary drama. But it has been a mass with notable leaders down to John Dewey in our day. The mass firmly believes in technological advance, material progress, the pragmatic life. For it the “law for thing” is supreme. The leaders subtilize and rationalize these beliefs.

The Baconians and Rousseauists are often superficially hostile to each other. We all know the contempt the scientific analyst frequently expresses for the dreamer, and in turn the dreamer’s horror of the analyst. But Babbitt demonstrates that the two types are in close accord underneath. Both deny the “law for man.” Both subscribe fervently to the doctrine of progress. And oftentimes in the same person you will find prominent strains of both types, happy in each other’s company.

It scarcely needs saying that the Rousseauist is in a much greater emotional ferment. The Baconian exalts practical intelligence, strenuous deeds accompanied by acute if narrow thought: the Rousseauist exalts sympathy, revery, spontaneity and liberty. His idea of liberty is summed up in the popular expression, “doing as one likes,” which means, Matthew Arnold labored to show, doing as one’s ordinary self likes. “Do what thou wilt,” the injunction over the Abbey of Theleme, is a far sterner permission and closer to the true idea of liberty.

It is, I think it necessary to repeat, not claimed by the New Humanist that contemporary Baconians and Rousseauists have been directly influenced by the remarkable men they are named after. The actual matter is very complex, as you will see by recourse to Babbitt’s books, but what is maintained is that unconsciously we breathe in the widespread gaseous elements of the teachings of Rousseau and Bacon and are profoundly modified in our entire outlook on civilization by the fact that they once lived.

In recent years the American college has been overrun by the Baconian scientific hustlers and by the Rousseauistic relaxed dilettantes--both menaces to humanistic education.

* * * * *

In college circles the Baconian is usually a specialist eager to advance learning in his branch of research but applying quantitative tests to his department and to the college in general. He is strenuous and imbued with the spirit of change. When he invades the arts, he is scientific rather than artistic. To give a concrete example, in the literature department the Baconian is the philologist, engaged in original and minute research, but usually lacking in æsthetic appreciation or in general ideas. He is supposed to teach the humanities: he has prepared for his vocation by composing a dissertation on the use of the present participle in some minor Elizabethan.

His colleague in the literature department is often a Rousseauist, a gelatinous æsthete, incapable of hard mental labor, who utilizes literature only as an agreeable source of sensations and impressions. The philologist, taking his cue from Herbert Spencer, is inclined to think of purely literary studies as a form of play, a relaxation, after the exacting labors of scientific analysis: the æsthete-teacher confirms him in the notion.

Against these men in the colleges the New Humanist fights. He opposes the quantitative and dynamic standards the Baconian would introduce, and he scorns the shallow impressionism of the dilettante teacher. His program calls for the continued teaching of the classics and the intimate relating of the classics to modern life. He insists that literature in the colleges should be taught as a vital subject bearing in countless important ways on the formation of character.

Instances abound of the contrary feeling that the classics cannot hold much import for the forming of modern character, and as one instance is as good as another, I will take the most recent to come to my notice. “Shakespeare No Benefit to This Age” is the heading of a newspaper column written by a former college professor, Harry Elmer Barnes, in which he declares that much might be said in support of the argument that “the beauty of Shakespeare’s diction and the shrewdness of his analysis are more than offset by the influence he exerts in keeping alive ancient superstitions like witchcraft, ghost-walking, devil-lore and the like. In short, Shakespeare does more harm than good to the twentieth century intellect.” It is grotesque narrow views of literature like this that the contemporary Humanist deplores in the ranks of teachers.

A succinct way of summing up the American Humanist’s educational program is to say that he favors the imitation of French scholarship rather than German. The latter of course reigns in our universities, and in these octopus-institutions, but not in the colleges, the Humanist grants it plenty of room, for the university may well exist for the advancement of learning, even if it is only the digging up of a trivial fact concerning some Alexandrian grammarian. But on the whole, “might we not advisedly turn now to France, where, to be sure, the scientific study of literature has also had a marked influence, but where other traditions of scholarship have offered a resistance wholly wanting with us? French reflection, French lucidity, French finesse, French moderation, the French concern for humane assimilation, the French devotion to general ideas, the French insistence upon taste and style, the French interest in criticism--these qualities, all but absent from our own work, I take to be worthy of emulation.” The words are from Norman Foerster’s _The American Scholar_, a lucid diagnosis of the ills of our literary scholarship:--its tendencies to be absorbed into linguistics, into history, into psychology, to become one of the lesser and dismal sciences.

By the way, the conditions analyzed by Foerster and the practical remedies he proposes at the end of his monograph ought to receive very thoughtful attention from the professional men of letters. The sufficient reason is contained in the following quotation: “Modern American scholarship is in a way to becoming a veritable Polyphemus, choicely nourished on human food yet endowed with one eye only. We must set about restoring the traditional alliance of scholarship and criticism, the divorce of which has worked injury to both and played havoc with education. It has made American scholarship narrowly mechanical and progressively tangential. It has encouraged an American criticism that can only be characterized as ignorant and aimlessly impressionistic, for the lamentable state of our critical journals is largely the consequence of academic failure to uphold the past as a school of judgment. And it has played a major rôle in the disintegration of American education, for it has made the study of the humanities scientific in an age already blinded with excess of scientific light, an age that is groping in vain for such other light as literature could shed if it were rightly studied.”

But my purpose precludes entering upon the details of the New Humanist’s criticism of college instruction or upon the concrete plans he presents for honors degrees and doctorate reforms. The broad idea is that the university may exist for the advancement of learning, but the college should stand for the assimilation of learning and the perpetuation of culture. It should train for wisdom and character by the processes of assimilation and reflection. It needs teachers of quality--not linguistic Dryas-dusts or quivering dilettanti. What is wanted, says the Humanist, is the teacher who has expended his originality (in our age it _is_ originality) in grasping the “constant mind of man,” who has disciplined himself on the best models of literature and formed from them a wise appreciation of the normal and representative, who has approximated to that type almost extinct in a civilization dominated by the Baconian specialist and the Rousseauistic thrill-monger, the _honnête homme qui ne se pique de rien_.

* * * * *

The full significance of the educational program of the American Humanists comes out best in a comparison of the policies advocated by Charles W. Eliot and Irving Babbitt. Eliot was President of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909. In that position he became famous as the father of the free-elective system, and until his death in 1926 ranked as America’s most ardent crusader for educational reform. He was highly esteemed for his character, a late flowering of the Puritan tradition, and he was immensely influential through his theories which were not Puritan: the theories were derived from Rousseau and therefore at variance with the Puritan tradition in its most vigorous state.

It is ironical that teaching under President Eliot for fourteen or fifteen years was his best weaponed and fearless critic, and that today this critic who condemned Eliot’s theories and influence should be acknowledged as the greatest mind at Harvard. Yet it is the case that Babbitt with his great strength for rending fallacies apart matured to power within the very baliwick of President Eliot.

The first clash was over the free-elective system. Eliot with his trust in human nature had reasoned that each student had a pronounced bent, some special aptitude, some absorbing interest which he was eager to follow, and that this interest or bent or aptitude was thwarted by a fixed curriculum. He was also impressed by the half-truth which he took to be a whole truth, namely, every person is unique and the college should therefore give full play to his uniqueness. To this Babbitt replied in substance that there is quality in subjects as well as quality in teaching. The free-elective system tends to deny quality in subjects and makes higher education miscellaneous. And he replied further that men have constant elements coexisting with their variability, and that it was the constant in man, not the diverse and fluctuating, which education should reckon with.

Facts have refuted President Eliot’s optimism about the free-elective system. It was found that students followed in choosing their courses not the line of their aptitudes, of which often they were unaware, but the line of least resistance. It was found that their uniquenesses were not so precious after all. The result was a partial retreat from the free-elective stand in favor of a compromise between the old restricted curriculum and the new unlimited one.

But the issue comes to a clearer head when the formulæ of the champions of utilitarian-humanitarian education and of humanistic-religious education are put side by side. “Training for power and service,” said President Eliot. Babbitt answered in words I have already used: “Training for wisdom and character.” Obviously President Eliot’s is a Bacon-Rousseau formula. How does it work? Power in our society means material efficiency, and service means, not the traditional service of God, but the service of man. The assumption is that “the material efficiency promoted by utilitarian effort will be used altruistically.” But after the Great War this assumption looks tragically ludicrous.

These are the conventions established by the age President Eliot represented so faithfully: self-expression as a value (or falling in the direction one’s character leans, an unfriendly critic might mutter), strenuousness (the pursuit of happiness by intense outer activity), the “religion of service” (nowadays satirized by the _American Mercury_ and Sinclair Lewis as only a veneer for commercialism), and complete faith in the natural man (in religious language, the hope of salvation without conversion). These conventions Babbitt has wrenched to pieces in his analysis and now proposes a return to the old humanistic-religious conventions.

In so far as the movement called American Humanism has a definite program of action, this is it. First, that “a considerable number of persons get at least within hailing distance of one another as to the definition of the word humanism itself and the nature of the discipline that this definition entails.” Next, that they then proceed “in the literal sense of that unjustly discredited term, to work out a convention.” And next, that they concern themselves with education. By setting up a convention is meant the thorough agreement among the members of a considerable group on certain fundamentals, the complete conviction of truth concerning certain underlying statements about life. The conventions that the New Humanists wish to reëstablish are: (1) that “happiness is a kind of working” (inner, not outer, working, according to Aristotle, who is here quoted), (2) that man needs to be disciplined in his natural self to some standard (that is, to undergo conversion or turning away from the natural self, such conversion to be accomplished in the Aristotelian way by the gradual formation from childhood of right habits), and (3) that education should culminate in the idea of leisure (also Aristotelian, since according to the New Humanist leisure is valuable for supplying a background of meditation to life).

Now I imagine that when the policy is thus reduced to essentials, many people will wonder why there is any opposition to American Humanism in the field of education. Yet the fact is that the principal forces in education move, blindly most of them, directly counter to the fundamental views of Humanism. It is an against-the-current struggle that the New Humanists undertake. They are fighting for quality of teaching in the humanities, and the current sweeps down upon them a horde of linguistic specialists. They are fighting for quality of subjects, and the classical subjects are steadily being submerged. Finally, they are fighting for quality of students, and the colleges and universities in their competition for big enrollments flood them with quantities of the less fit for the intellectual life. For the New Humanist declares flatly that the college should exist for the intellectually best of each generation. Humanitarian coddling in the colleges he denounces as a danger to democracy, pointing out that in a quantitative age the college must make its great purpose to be the production of men of quality. In fine, the educational problem is closely associated with the problem of leadership, and the problem of leadership leads us straight into the subject of the next chapter--the political problems of a democracy.

X

HUMANISM, ECONOMICS, POLITICS

_“We have the naked question to answer: How shall a society, newly
shaking itself free from a disguised plutocratic régime, be guided
to suffer the persuasion of a natural aristocracy which has none of
the insignia of an old prescription to impose its authority? Shall
the true justice prevail, which by a right discrimination would
confer power and influence in accordance with inner distinction;
or shall that so-called justice prevail--for no man acknowledges
open injustice--which recommends itself as equality of opportunity,
but in practice, by confusing the distinctions of age, sex, and
character, comes at last to the brutal doctrine that might makes
right, whether that might be the material strength of money or the
jealous tyranny of numbers?”_--Paul Elmer More in _Aristocracy and
Justice: Shelburne Essays, Ninth Series_.

The educational theories of the New Humanists, I think it must be granted, are thoroughly consonant with the premises of the New Humanism. Education, at least through the college, ought to be dominated by the spirit of conservation. In the university and afterwards, the spirit of change ought to have full opportunity, for by that time presumably the student is safeguarded against that mere “passage from nothing to nothing” which Whitehead tells us happens when there is “change without conservation.” The college is the place for the assimilation of the traditional wisdom, which acts as a check on the wisdom of any particular age. It is the place where today it is most disastrous not to temper liberty with restraint, and it seems to me that the New Humanist has most admirably mediated between pure restraint and pure liberty in his educational program. A contempt for antiquity, Tocqueville sagely remarked, is a chief danger of democracy, and for that reason the study of the classics has a special value in a democratic community--the New Humanist goes with Tocqueville and not with the contemporary poet who has shouted, “The past is a bucket of ashes.”

But how is it with the excursions of the New Humanists into the disputed territory of economics and politics? Are their known views on these subjects the views that must inevitably be adopted if one accepts their primary teaching of a psychological dualism and a discipline based on the law of measure? Or are there several views which might with equal consistency be taken up? Or can we say that they are good Humanists but bad economists? The question has come up at least once before. Referring to historical Humanism, Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., has written, “We might say that the humanistic attitude was to seek a fine worldly wisdom through direct study of man in thought and action, such study being powerfully reënforced from those precedents of great living contained in the literature of Greece and Rome--a fresh research balanced and somewhat directed and measured by a great tradition. I can find no stricter formula that seems to fit the case. The attitude adumbrated above seems compatible with many other attitudes, indeed with almost any attitude that is not dogmatic or fanatical, or life-denying. For example, today one might be an agnostic humanist, a Catholic humanist; a royalist humanist, a socialist humanist; a utilitarian humanist, an idealist humanist; conceivably a Mormon humanist or a liberal hard-shell Baptist humanist. That is, a quest of a fine worldly wisdom nurtured by tradition might in theory be compatible with any of these policies, philosophies or faiths. Nor does this divest the notion of humanism of any real meaning if the main thing be the attitude, for the humanistic attitude may be after all simply a leaven which is potent in the most various materials.” In this statement the attitude of Humanism is pretty dilute for our exposition, but in any case the question of strictly relating attitude to views is effectively opened up for discussion. Perhaps Humanism as a creative conception of man does not dictate any one economic or political theory as its logical choice? Perhaps it is the _spirit_ with which More and Babbitt have studied the problems of economics that is criticizable?

The obvious danger of the New Humanist when doubtful matters are debated is to drop into an acceptance of the status quo just because it is the status quo. He is proof against the temptation of the “radical” which is novelty for the sake of novelty, but it is easily possible that where an obdurate social problem exists, he may justify the status quo instead of wholeheartedly throwing himself _into_ the problem. This in effect is what in the chapter on _Science and the Modern Man_ I accused him of doing: it seems to me he adheres to the outmoded Cartesian world-view when he should instead plunge into the problem of reconstructing a world-view. And I am inclined to think that Paul Elmer More, whose views on property and law, aristocracy and justice I shall glance at before taking up Babbitt’s political theory, has fallen into this error of identifying the status quo or commonly accepted position with a truly conservative solution. It is conceivable, I mean, that both the status quo of social organization and the current schemes for reforming it might be equally objectionable to a profoundly conservative mind.

* * * * *

More has not the type of mind that functions happily in economics and politics. His absorbing interest has been in Man Psychologic and he has had little traffic with Man Economic or Man Political. But the rise of Socialism in the United States and the Bull Moose Progressive movement challenged his mind around 1912, and in _Aristocracy and Justice_, the ninth volume of the _Shelburne Essays_, he answered, or rather defied, the new tendencies. By his conclusions in this volume on man as an economic and political animal, he probably incurred more hostility than any of his other books has provoked. For _Aristocracy and Justice_ came out in 1915, the very time that the social revolt movement in the United States was fairly getting off the ground for a dizzy if brief flight: the dominant concerns of the generation of thinkers younger than More were precisely his subordinate concerns, economics and politics. Naturally, the new generation dropped bombs on _Aristocracy and Justice_, and with a ferocity partly accounted for by More’s sharp tone in writing it. The result was that the strongest side of More, his continuous reflection on Man Psychologic, was avoided or made light of, and his weakest side, his thought about Man Economic and Man Political, was bombarded to fragments.

To begin with, More made the mistake of not arguing out economic questions on the basis of economics, but instead made a direct appeal to intelligent members of the propertied class to stiffen their morale. “I am not here concerned,” he declared, “with Utopian visions, nor, as I have said, am I arguing with those who are honestly persuaded that a socialistic régime is, in our day, or any day, economically or psychologically feasible. My desire is rather to confirm in the dictates of their own reason those who believe that the private ownership of property, including its production and distribution, is, with very limited reservation, essential to the material stability and progress of society. We who have this conviction need very much today to strengthen ourselves against the insidious charms of a misapplied idealism; we need to remind ourselves that laws which would render capital insecure and, by a heavy income tax or other discrimination in favor of labor, would deprive property of its power of easy self-perpetuation, though they speak loudly in the name of humanity, will in the end be subversive of those conditions under which alone any true value of human life can be realized.” Do you wonder at the vehement accusations that More was simply rationalizing class prejudice?

We need one more statement to catch the drift of More’s views: it is likewise an uncompromising one. “In simple truth, property may rightly be called the cause of civilization, but, strictly speaking, it is only the occasion of injustice: injustice is inherent in the imperfection of man, and the development of the means of living merely brings into greater prominence what is an unavoidable feature of existence, not for man only but for the whole range of creation, in this puzzling world of ours.”

What More did then was to commit himself in advance to capitalist economics, a system which may most briefly be defined as production for the sake of profits or in one word profiteering. Can it be denied that the main motive on which it relies is the desire for gain? And this motivation, as economists admit, introduces an ethical contradiction into the practices of the State. Nevertheless, many people claim that there is nothing wrong with the theory of capitalism, and towards the ethical defect it introduces they adopt two views: one, that the defect may be remedied by education, the other, that it is inherent in human nature. More adopts the latter view.

Now if capitalism is supported by a perfect theory, then from the standpoint of economics there is nothing more to say, no matter how horribly the thing might work in practice. For economics as the science of production abstracts from the human as much as possible and regards our feelings as irrelevant. But _does_ capitalism operate on a sound theory? This, in a thinker of Paul Elmer More’s eminence, is the first question we should expect him to answer, the more so as it is often charged that the theory of capitalism is only improvised. But as we have seen, he does not. He proceeds almost at once to declare that “the security of property is the first and all-essential duty of a civilized community”; shortly afterwards he says, “To the civilized man _the rights of property are more important than the right to life_.”[7]

These statements pass if capitalism is correct in theory. But, once again, is it? In the briefest possible space, I shall give the theoretical objections. It is well understood, of course, that by capitalist economics there are said to be three factors of production, Land, Capital and Labor. Land and Capital, however, have become practically indistinguishable: they are alike tools of production. But is Labor also a tool of production? It is, according to capitalist economics; Land, Capital and Labor exhaust the tools of production, and the user of them is the Capitalist, that is, the owner of the tools of Land and Capital.

But this theory, as every one knows, has been long and brilliantly criticized in the realm of pure thought, precisely the realm in which More should have debated the moot point. For there is a moot point: is Labor a factor of production? No, say the critics, Labor is not congruous with the factors of Land and Capital. Labor is a mere abstraction that hides Laborers. Laborers (i.e., Labor) are the tool-users, the producers themselves, and at bottom economics reduces not to three terms but to just two, Laborers and Tools or Workmen and Stuff. Hence the new industrial synthesis, it is said, must substitute the Laborer for the Capitalist, the real user of the real tools of production for the mere owner of them. Therefore, when More speaks of the rights of property, we need to concretize the word property: what he speaks of is the rights of property- or tool-owners or capitalists, and it is precisely those “rights” that now require defence in the region of pure theory.

Proceed one step further, and we shall run up against More’s argument for the rights of property-owners as the basis of civilization. Economics, we must remember, is separated from its soul: what is more, it legitimately cuts itself off. Where is its soul? “The soul of economics,” writes A. R. Orage in _An Alphabet of Economics_, “is politics, and it is to politics that economics delegates the control of questions such as what shall be produced, by whom, and how the results shall be distributed.... To satisfy all our needs and desires without work is really the aim of economic man. It is his object, in fact, to reverse the curse upon Adam.... Instead of requiring the improvements in economics to be shared equitably, politics insists upon dividing them inequitably, so that one small class is enabled practically to lift from itself the curse of Adam (that is, it can live without working), while the large class of laborers are permitted to incur a double curse--they work, that is, without living. Economists of the baser sort or who have no political sense pretend that this distribution of the product is itself economic in that it enables the few to secrete Capital (that is to save) and to foster arts and science requiring a long, leisured, and assumed future. Better knowledge, however, convinces us that it is not safe to depend upon a social class for an economic function.” How the author of _Aristocracy and Justice_ would answer this, I cannot conceive, for no inkling is given.

We have crossed from economics to politics, and in the latter one of the greatest themes is justice. Naturally, More as a Platonist does not minimize this theme. Justice “is the act of right distribution,” he begins by way of definition, “the giving to each man his due.” This, please note, is a capitalist-political definition, and we may place beside it for comparison the well-known formula: from each according to his _means_, to each according to his _needs_. Social justice, More continues, “is such a distribution of power and privilege, and of property as the symbol and instrument of these, as at once will satisfy the distinctions of reason among the superior, and will not outrage the feelings of the inferior.” But how, one may well ask, can social justice ever be expected to take place when the principle of distribution is the principle of--the pig trough? For economic power in our society precedes and determines the distribution of commodities; the man with the dollars feeds and sometimes gorges and the man without dollars does not; and this does not satisfy the reason and it does outrage the feelings. More himself says we must steel ourselves to a certain extent when viewing this method of distribution. “The first and hardest lesson for each right-minded man in these days is to discipline the heart to accept with equanimity the fatal fact that social justice must include a considerable amount of that disposition of Nature in dealing with her own which we, judging by the standard of the individual soul, are so ready to call injustice. The first step towards the equipoise of a soul just within itself is to recognize the necessity of a measure of injustice in the relation of man with man and with the world.”

I postpone comment on that in order to complete in this place the outline of More’s political thought. Guided by the reflections of Edmund Burke, the key idea for him is the formation of “a natural aristocracy without which there is no nation,” according to Burke. “The cure of democracy,” says More, “is not _more_ democracy, but _better_ democracy.” And better democracy will come when we develop more men who might fit into Burke’s celebrated portrait of the men of light and leading: “Men who are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

This is assuredly a humanistic ideal of a natural aristocracy, but under present economic-political conditions have we any chance of reaching it? We may get the natural aristocrats, but will they be anywhere near the centers of political power? When we get to the bottom, we are all likely to accept the definition of the political power of the individual as being his power of self-direction; but obviously the individual’s power of self-direction presupposes the power of keeping himself alive. That is, the condition of political power is economic power. To continue: voting is a process whereby individuals empower an executive. They increase their powers of self-direction by concentrating them upon the executive who acts in their behalf. But when the voters are of unequal economic power, their votes are necessarily unequal. In fact, the votes of many of them, who have no power of keeping themselves alive but are correctly termed wage-slaves, have no meaning at all: they can guarantee nothing. The executive therefore quite naturally listens only to those whose votes do mean economic power, because these are the only votes coming from individuals who have power of self-direction. It seems to me that this consideration has a very corrosive effect on any dream of a natural aristocracy arising in our plutocratic community.

Because the discussion of More’s economics and politics has been rather compact up to this point, a restatement is offered. More, as one of the leaders of the New Humanists, has not dealt with the purely theoretical analyses of capitalism. I do not say he is unable to, or unfamiliar with the arguments: the fact is that he has omitted a theoretical justification. To those who believe that the critique of capitalism has been a devastating one, this is an inexcusable omission. Secondly, to many people, including a considerable number who are not humanitarians, capitalism is an inhumane system. They would criticize More’s sentiment of justice, which seems to me in this particular to be weak, though it is possible he represses his feelings from dislike of the humanitarian gushing on the topic of social justice. There is, all the same, a love of all men which can, which must, in fact, enter into our sentiment of justice to temper the rigor of it, and this love of all men to which I refer has nothing of the humanitarian “universal embrace” about it. Without love there is in truth no justice. But the difference between humanistic love and humanitarian love I should define as a difference in what in man is loved. Humanism, I quoted Julien Benda as saying in an earlier chapter, holds in honor the abstract quality of what is human, and this permits us to love _all_ men, for there is equality in the abstract. Joseph Proudhon (to whom Benda objected) does, I think, express the humane sentiment of justice perfectly without spilling over into humanitarian sentimentality. I mean he singles out that in all men which is worthy of love and toward which one is irresistibly drawn to be just if one loves it. “There is a tendency in every man to develop and force the acceptance of that which is essentially himself--which is, in fact, his own dignity. It results from this that the essential in man being identical and one for all humanity, each of us is aware of himself at the same time as individual and as species; and that an insult is felt by a third party and by the offender himself as well as by the injured person, that in consequence the protest is common. This precisely is what is meant by Justice.” It is evident that Proudhon has an idea of Justice, which is crystal-clear and crystal-hard, and that he feels this idea intensely. The presence of a burning emotion for the idea of Justice I cannot detect in More as a social thinker: his idea seems a mental skeleton wired and strung up by class feelings.

In the third place, I tried to point out that a Burkean aristocracy will have a most difficult time coming into being in a democracy which Georges Sorel defined as the paradise unscrupulous financiers dream of. In short, present-day economics in its effect on politics is all against it.

But if the system of production for profit is untenable intellectually and is inhumane and therefore untenable emotionally, it may still be the best that can be put in practice, granting that human nature is radically imperfect. It may be good enough for man because man is not good enough for a more perfect system. The one fatal objection to certain revolutionary schemes in the end may be that they are too perfect for man as he is, that they will not work in practice as they work on paper, unless man himself is first transformed. More made that objection, and it is possibly his soundest argument. But it will be interesting now to speculate on the possibility that a radical program of economic reform might conceivably fit in with the basic ideas and sentiments of the New Humanists. The Soviet Union I shall leave pretty much out of account, for there you have a _fact_ to study and make up your mind about. And possibly that fact in its present degree of unfoldment demands not so much an intellectual and moral decision as suspended judgment from the individual American. Furthermore, I agree with T. S. Eliot that Russian communism like Italian fascism seems to have died as a political theory in becoming a political fact. Our present purpose which is to determine how flexible the Humanist attitude may be in economics and politics is better served by reference to a single extraordinary revolutionary (our example will be Sorel) than it would be by an attempt in too short a space to analyze a complicated fact that contains so many peculiarly Russian ingredients to be subtracted before it is really instructive to us.

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Perhaps the most fascinating of all the theorists of the social revolution (but who reads him in America?) is Georges Sorel (1847-1922), whose _Reflections on Violence_ was translated into English by T. E. Hulme. Karl Marx had plotted out the acts of the Capitalist tragedy, but by planting the idea of a class struggle so prominently into the minds of men, by making men more conscious of the opposition of capitalist and proletarian, Marx also introduced an unforeseen factor working not for class war but for social peace. Clearly understanding by the aid of Marx that society was in a state of internal war, the peacemakers arose in mass. There was a general amelioration of working conditions, there were concessions from the capitalists, there grew up a pronounced tendency to blur and soften the issues, to make everything a parliamentarian question. Sorel determined to combat this movement toward pacifying the proletariat, and the means he chose to throw into relief again the essential struggle of the classes was to concentrate on the depiction of the last act of a tragedy that might conceivably play on for centuries. He concentrated on the vision of the general strike, the vast social cataclysm that was to overthrow the capitalist régime. By means of this vision he hoped to counteract the parliamentarian socialists and the philanthropic capitalists, and thus preserve the purity of the class struggle.

The results were curious. Mussolini has told of his youthful fervor for Sorel’s doctrine, and Sorel wrote an apology for Bolshevism. The best thinker that French syndicalism has had, Sorel was nevertheless saluted with enthusiasm by Frenchmen of the extreme right: he was hailed by the Action Française! Pierre Lasserre, the anti-Rousseauist, has written a book about him, _Georges Sorel: Théoricien de l’Impérialisme_, and many Marxists have been indignant because Sorel considered himself a true follower of Marx. Evidently a paradoxical thinker. But he was not. He was miscomprehended by many for the sole reason that he was a revolutionary classicist, which is not a paradoxical combination.

What Sorel did was to separate the working class movement from the democratic or liberal-romantic or humanitarian ideology with which it is habitually associated. He demonstrated forcefully that there was no inevitable connection between them. They were not Siamese twins, not even twins, but strangers who by an accident of history had been chained together for three score years. Sorel’s intellect filed through the chains and showed that one could be revolutionary in economics and classical in ethics--to the astonishment of everybody.

As he has had practically no vogue in American revolutionary circles, it is excusable to say a few words about his personal development before singling out some aspects of his classical ethics. Proudhon had tried to combine the classical ideal with socialism, and Sorel seems to have taken his first direction from Proudhon. Marx blinded him with light for a time, but it was characteristic of Sorel that he always recovered his sight and eventually saw things with his own eyes. Nietzsche was another master whose teachings he divided into the valuable ideas and the rubbish. Proudhon, Marx, Nietzsche--there were lesser masters he carefully sifted: Bergson, Vico. He read widely, profoundly. In his first book he maintained--a Nietzschean idea--that Socrates represented the decadence of Athenian life, the charge being that Socrates introduced expediency and calculation into ethics. He wrote a study of Renan and a study entitled _Illusions du Progrès_ which the anti-revolutionary Maritain has commended for its thorough destruction of the middle-class notion of progress. The Dreyfus case completely disillusioned Sorel with democracy and he plunged into the anti-patriotic extreme revolutionary movement on whose behalf he fought Jaurès and the other parliamentarian socialists with all the withering scorn of a bold thinker and a bold man.

I have said that he severed the ties between the revolutionary workers’ movement and the romantic-humanitarian ideology. He did this by scathing criticism of the sham religiosity of the romantic movement, by excoriating the doctrine of progress, by exposing the middle class conception of science. The last is worth quoting for the benefit of the numerous Baconians to be found in our own liberal and revolutionary groups. “The history of scientific superstitions,” Sorel asserts, “is of the deepest interest to philosophers who wish to understand Socialism. During the nineteenth century there existed an incredible scientific ingenuousness which was the direct outcome of the illusions that had aroused so much excitement towards the end of the eighteenth century. Because astronomers had managed to calculate the tables of the moon, it was believed that the aim of all science was to forecast the future with accuracy; because Le Verrier had been able to indicate the probable position of the planet Neptune--which had never been seen, and which accounted for the disturbances of observable planets--it was believed that science could remedy the defects of society, and indicate what measures should be taken to bring about the disappearance of the unpleasant things in the world. It may be said that this was the _middle-class conception of science_: it certainly corresponds very closely to the mental attitude of those capitalists, who, ignorant of the perfected appliances of their workshops, yet direct industry, and always find ingenious inventors to get them out of difficulties. For the middle-class science is a mill which produces solutions to all the problems we are faced with: science is no longer considered as a perfected means to knowledge, but only as a recipe for procuring certain advantages.”

There is a great deal, too, in Sorel that might be advantageously perused by our social reformers. For the benefit of humanitarians, I shall transcribe Sorel’s deep objection to optimists in the ranks of reform. “The optimist in politics is an inconstant and even dangerous man, because he takes no account of the great difficulties presented by his projects; these projects seem to him to possess a force of their own, which tends to bring about their realization all the more easily as they are, in his opinion, destined to produce the happiest results. He frequently thinks that small reforms in the political constitution, and, above all, in the personnel of government, will be sufficient to direct social development in such a way as to mitigate those evils of the contemporary world which seem so harsh to the sensitive mind. As soon as his friends come into power, he declares that it is necessary to let things alone for a little, not to hurry too much, and to learn how to be content with whatever their own benevolent intentions prompt them to do. It is not always self-interest that suggests these expressions of satisfaction, as people have often believed; self-interest is strongly aided by vanity and by the illusions of philosophy. The optimist passes with remarkable facility from revolutionary anger to the most ridiculous social pacificism.

“If he possesses an exalted temperament, and if unhappily he finds himself armed with a great power, permitting him to realize the ideal he has fashioned, the optimist may lead his country into the worst disasters. He is not long in finding out that social transformations are not brought about with the ease that he had counted on; he then supposes that this is the fault of his contemporaries, instead of explaining what actually happens by historical necessities; he is tempted to get rid of people whose obstinacy seems to him to be so dangerous to the happiness of all. During the Terror, the men who spilt most blood were precisely those who had the greatest desire to let their equals enjoy the golden age they had dreamt of, and who had the most sympathy with human wretchedness: optimists, idealists, and sensitive men, the greater desire they had for universal happiness the more inexorable they showed themselves.”

Obviously this side of Sorel is quite in accord with the reiterations of More and Babbitt. Humanitarianism, they repeat, is a menace because in its fatuous hope of a brotherhood of man without a prior discipline of man’s egoistic impulses, it leads directly to the shambles and the rise of a bloodstained dictator. Making light of the obstacles in its path, humanitarianism, when the obstacles will not vanish at the outflowing of sympathy, loses its head and massacres. But it is not in the least implied that Sorel, the enemy of Rousseauism, was on his positive side humanistic. Quite the reverse: he rejected the method of the golden mean, and for reasons that have some weight. The following paragraph will serve as his criticism of American Humanism, prepared years in advance of its full emergence.

“The ideas held by modern ethical writers are drawn mainly from those of Greece in its time of decadence; Aristotle, living in a period of transition, combined ancient values with values that, as time went on, were to prevail; war and production had ceased to occupy the attention of the most distinguished men of the towns, who sought, on the contrary, to secure an easy existence for themselves; the most important thing was the establishment of friendly relations between the better educated men of the community, and the fundamental maxim was that of the golden mean. The new morality was to be acquired principally by means of the habits which the young Greek would pick up in mixing with cultivated people. It may be said here we are on the level of an ethic adapted to consumers; it is not astonishing then that Catholic theologians still find Aristotle’s ethics an excellent one, for they themselves take the consumer’s point of view.”

Sorel, as a matter of fact, had a vestige of the classical religious spirit and not the humanistic temper at all. He was an absolutist in ethics. He was a pessimist, convinced of social determinism, which he compared to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and convinced of the wretchedness of man, or one might say, original sin. The march to deliverance he said was narrowly conditioned by these two: the iron laws of social determinism and the weakness of man. Yet he believed in “a _secret virtue_ which assures the continued progress of the world” and defined it as “this striving towards perfection which manifests itself, in spite of the absence of any personal, immediate, and proportional reward.”

Thus, he tried to root the syndicalist movement in a classical pessimistic conception of man and to identify the growth of the movement with the regeneration of the world. His finest stroke was his method for rousing the group of sentiments necessary for the regeneration: the sentiments of disinterestedness, heroism, glory, and even sublimity. It was the method of the myth, from which incidentally the New Humanists might learn something, it seems to me, which would give a real driving emotional power to their campaign. What that something is has already been suggested in the chapter on _The Classical Revival Abroad_.

Sorel advocated the myth of the general strike. Just as the early Christians had looked forward to an Apocalypse, had prepared themselves rigorously for it, had shown the most heroic qualities in enduring persecution, so, Sorel argued, the proletariat should look forward always to a decisive Napoleonic battle, a social catastrophe for which every least action was a preparation, and they should understand what the function of violence is, namely, to keep perfectly clear the grandiose outline of the class struggle. Into the criticism of this we need not venture. It should be noted, however, that Sorel explained carefully that “myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of determinations to act.” And finally, mention should be made of his view that the bourgeoisie must keep up its warlike morale. He felt it essential for the future success of civilization that the proletariat should take over a vigorous, and not a decadent, system of capitalist production. No doubt this idea was one of the factors of his popularity with the group around Charles Maurras.

My treatment of Sorel, I am aware, is too scanty to serve as an introduction to his ideas, and at the same time perhaps too long for the purpose now, which is simply to suggest by referring to Sorel that the good man of Rousseau and the Marxian revolutionist are not inseparable companions. Sorel made a new coupling, the Homeric hero and the social revolutionist, a combination that I happen to think would bode better for the future.

Reverting to our proper topic, the question is: can Humanism and the revolutionary movement join hands? Extremely unlikely, of course, and yet I can conceive of a Humanist revolutionary. He would have convinced himself that in the clash on first principles of political economy (between first principles there can be no mediation) the revolutionaries were right, and he would therefore oppose the forces of capitalism as strongly as More opposes socialism. But in any revolutionary party he joined, he would have an Augean stable of illusions to clear out before he could satisfy himself that the revolutionists could really fulfil their pledges of a better society. He would have to persuade his comrades to throw out the accumulated rubbish of humanitarianism, the naïve notions of the goodness at heart of the proletarian, the intellectual fallacies, the spilth of feeling that you will find rampant in a writer like Upton Sinclair. This clearing away of sloppy sentiment and fuzzy ideas would be of enormous advantage to the revolutionary movement, but, as I say, it is extremely unlikely that a Humanist Hercules will rise to perform it. Sooner or later the technique of mediation would, in all probability, be put to such a strain that it would be relegated to a secondary place, and our hypothetical humanistic revolutionist would make foremost the method of the myth or some other disciplinary conception. When that happened, he might retain humanistic elements in his life, but he would cease to be a Humanist in the Babbittean sense.

There is, however, much of a medicinal nature that the best minds among our social revolutionaries can absorb from their opponents, More and Babbitt, without undergoing conversion to conservatism. Let us hope that the bitter taste will not deter them. For they will be better off in respect to background, values and psychological interpretation of man than before.

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