Key ideas: Published in 1943. "His stories, lessons, observations, and conclusions pack a very powerful punch, so much so that anyone who takes time to read carefully cannot but end up changed in intellectual outlook. One feels that one has been let in a private club of people who see more deeply than others. This is truly an American classic."
The net profit of my first few years of life appears to have been a fairly explicit understanding of the fact that ignorance exists. It has paid me Golconda’s dividends regularly ever since, and the share-value of my small original investment has gone sky-high.
This understanding came about so easily and naturally that for many years I took it as a commonplace, assuming that everyone had it. My subsequent contacts with the world at large, however, showed me that everyone does not have it, indeed that those who have it are extremely few.
They seemed particularly and pitifully few when one contemplated the colossal pretensions which, in its modesty, the human race puts forth about itself. I found myself projected into a society which was riotously pretentious, forever congratulating itself at the top of its voice on its achievements and abilities, its virtues and excellences, its resources and prospects, and calling on all the world to admire them; and yet a society by and large “too ignorant to know that there is such a thing as ignorance”!...
Moreover, when I got around to read Plato, I found that he reinforced and copper-fastened the notion which experience had already rather forcibly suggested, that direct attempts to overcome and enlighten ignorance are a doubtful venture; the notion that it is impossible, as one of my friends puts it, to tell anybody anything which in a very real sense he does not already know.
One of the most offensive things about the society in which I later found myself was its monstrous itch for changing people. It seemed to me a society made up of congenital missionaries, natural-born evangelists and propagandists, bent on re-shaping, re-forming and standardising people according to a pattern of their own devising—and what a pattern it was, good heavens! when one came to examine it. It seemed to me, in short, a society fundamentally and profoundly ill-bred.
A very small experience of it was enough to convince me that Cain’s heresy was not altogether without reason or without merit; and that conviction quickly ripened into a great horror of every attempt to change anybody; or I should rather say, every wish to change anybody, for that is the important thing.
The attempt is relatively immaterial, perhaps, for it is usually its own undoing, but the moment one wishes to change anybody, one becomes like the socialists, vegetarians, prohibitionists; and this, as Rabelais says, “is a terrible thing to think upon.”
Good literature was much easier come by in my early days than it is now, and it was also much cheaper. One reason for this was that the United States had no international copyright-law until some time in the early ‘nineties;" American publishers could reproduce the works of foreign authors at no more than the cost of printing and binding. Concerns like the Seaside Library and Lovell’s Library drove a roaring trade in pirated books at ten cents a copy, paper-bound, or twenty cents for “double numbers.”...
We were all receleurs in those days. Not being a Benthamite, I am unable to defend literary piracy on high moral grounds, but I must admit that the massive testimony of our book-catalogues from, say, 1860 to 1890 comes nearer to making a complete case for the whole doctrine of expediency than anything else I know of. If Bentham’s “greatest good to the greatest number” sums up the whole canon of right and wrong, no more convincing evidence could be adduced...
Another reason why good literature was more easily accessible then than now is that the proportion of literacy in our population was much lower, and publishers were not under such heavy economic pressure to block up the access to good literature with trash.
One might assume that as the level of literacy rose, the level of general intelligence would rise with it, and consequently that the economic demand for good literature would also rise. This, roughly, was Mr. Jefferson’s idea, and indeed it has always been at the root of our system of free public instruction for everyone. It has, however, somehow failed to work out according to expectation.
The level of literacy has been pushed up very nearly to the practicable limit, but the level of general intelligence seems not to have risen appreciably, and the economic demand for good literature is apparently no greater in relation to a population of a hundred and thirty million than it was to one that was going on for sixty million; in fact, one would say it is much less.
The reason for this is plain enough; there is nothing recondite about it. In his view of literacy, Mr. Jefferson was only half right. He was obviously right in premising that no illiterate person can read; but he was guilty of a thundering non distributio medii in his tacit conclusion that any literate person can read. On the contrary, as I discovered as long ago as my undergraduate days, very few literate persons are able to read, very few indeed.
This can be proven by observation and experiment of the simplest kind. I do not mean that the great majority are unable to read intelligently; I mean that they are unable to read at all—unable, that is, to carry away from a piece of printed matter anything like a correct idea of its content.
They are more or less adept at passing printed matter through their minds, after a fashion, especially such matter as is addressed to mere sensation, (and knowledge of this fact is nine-tenths of a propagandist’s equipment), but this is not reading. Reading implies a use of the reflective faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the anthropoid stage, let alone possessing it at a stage of development which makes reading practicable.
As I said, the fact that few literate persons can read is easily determinable by experiment. What first put me on track of it was a remark by one of my old professors. He said that there were people so incompetent, so given to reading with their eyes and their emotions instead of with their brains, that they would accuse the Psalmist of atheism because he had written, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”
The remark stuck by me, and I remember wondering at the time whether the trouble might be that such people hardly had the brains to read with. It seemed possible...
And what kind of reasoning is this?—if Bogrov was a Jew, and the death of Stolypin was a disaster for Russia and made it easier to start a revolution, then that means Solzhenitsyn blames the Jews for the 1917 revolution? In fact, they are demanding the censorship of history. (Between Two Millstones Solzhenitsyn)Is it any different from "accusing the Psalmist of atheism because he had written, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”?
The curiosity excited by these two obiter dicta has caused me to keep a weather eye out on the reading-habits of my fellow-beings ever since, and they have testified with monotonous regularity to the fact that while the ability to read must presuppose literacy, literacy is no guarantee whatever of the ability to read, nor even would it suggest that ability to an ordinarily observant mind. One might suppose that so simple and easily demonstrable a fact as this would long ago have attracted attention and caused comment; but it seems not to have done so.
Few diversions have interested and amused me more than watching the operation of Gresham’s law as it bore progressively on the permeation of a whole people by Mr. Jefferson’s faulty logic.
Our primary assumption was that literacy is a good-in-itself, an absolute good; therefore everybody should be taught to read and write. Any question about this was inadmissible; any doubt that everybody could be so taught was disallowed.
When I came on the scene, our system of popular instruction was driving straight ahead with all its might towards its goal of universal literacy, naïvely unaware that any such formidable obstacle as Gresham’s law lay in its way. True, this obstacle was not yet in plain view, but surely one would think that the collective foresight of a whole country would have suspected that it must be there.
Plenty of bad literature was knocking about in my boyhood, but not enough of it to drive out the good; that is to say, nothing like the full force of Gresham’s law had as yet been brought to bear on literary production. Publishers could make a decent profit out of producing books designed, not for persons who were merely literate, but for a relatively small and steady market composed of persons who could read.
But within my lifetime the country became largely literate, thus opening an immense market made up of persons who were unable to read but, as Bishop Butler said, were able to pass literary produce through their minds. As this market widened, the satisfaction of it became increasingly profitable, and therefore the best energies of publishers, dragooned under the iron hand of Gresham’s law, were bent that way.
It is one of my oddest experiences that I have never been able to find any one who would tell me what the net social value of a compulsory universal literacy actually comes to when the balance of advantage and disadvantage is drawn, or wherein that value consists.
The few Socratic questions which on occasion I have put to persons presumably able to tell me have always gone by the board. These persons seemed to think, like Protagoras on the teaching of virtue, that the thing was so self-evident and simple that I should know all about it without being told; but in the hardness of my head or heart I still do not find it so.
Universal literacy helps business by extending the reach of advertising and increasing its force; and also in other ways. Beyond that I see nothing on the credit side. On the debit side, it enables scoundrels to beset, dishevel and debauch such intelligence as is in the power of the vast majority of mankind to exercise. There can be no doubt of this, for the evidence of it is daily spread wide before us on all sides.
More than this, it makes many articulate who should not be so, and otherwise would not be so. It enables mediocrity and sub-mediocrity to run rampant, to the detriment of both intelligence and taste. In a word, it puts into a people’s hands an instrument which very few can use, but which everyone supposes himself fully able to use; and the mischief thus wrought is very great.
Being alone in my undertakings, I had the inestimable advantage of being unaffected by the law of diminishing returns. I got all I could take in of everything that was coming my way. Not until much later, when I had seen something of mass-education and observed its results, did I perceive how great this advantage is.
With Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other, the student gets the best out of Hopkins and gets as much of it as he can absorb; the law of diminishing returns does not touch him. Add twenty students, and neither he nor the twenty gets the same thing; add two hundred, and it is luck if anybody gets anything remotely like the same thing.
All Souls College, Oxford, planned better than it knew when it limited the number of its undergraduates to four; four is exactly the right number for any college which is really intent on getting results.
Socrates chatting with a single protagonist meant one thing, and well did he know it. Socrates lecturing to a class of fifty would mean something woefully different, so he organised no class and did no lecturing.
Jerusalem was a university town, and in a university every day is field-day for the law of diminishing returns. Jesus stayed away from Jerusalem, and talked with fishermen here and there, who seem to have pretty well got what He was driving at; some better than others, apparently, but all on the whole pretty well. And so we have it that unorganised Christianity was one thing, while organised Christianitv has consistently been another.
We were all supposed to respect our government and its laws, yet by all accounts those who were charged with the conduct of government and the making of its laws were most dreadful swine; indeed, the very conditions of their tenure precluded their being anything else. For a moment I wondered why this should be so; but my wonderment almost immediately petered out, and I did not brood over the rationâle of politics again for a great many years.
One incident of election night, however, stuck in my memory. Some devoted patriot, very far gone in whisky, wandered up in our direction and fell by the wayside in a vacant lot where he lay all night, mostly in a comatose state. At intervals of half an hour or so he roused himself up, apparently conscious that he was not doing his duty by the occasion, and tried to sing the chorus of “Marching Through Georgia,” but he could never get quite through the first three measures without relapsing into somnolence. It was very amusing; he always began so bravely and earnestly, and always faded out so lamentably.
Having devoted a great part of my latter years to a close observation of public affairs in many lands, I have often had occasion to remember that man. His sense of patriotism and patriotic duty still seems as intelligent and competent as that of any one I have met since then, and his mode of expressing it still seems as effective as any I could suggest.
Life here [Michigan, a remote lumber town] gave me a close view of qualities which I was of course too young to appraise at their full value, but when I came to review them in later life I saw that my impression of them had been clear and germinal. Independence, self-respect, self-reliance, dignity, diligence,—often narrow and primitive in their manifestations, if you like, ill-rounded, not at all durchgearbeitet, but there they were, the virtues that once spoke out in the Declaration of Independence. It was noticeable, too, that these virtues flourished as well as they did in a state of freedom. Our life was singularly free; we were so little conscious of arbitrary restraint that we hardly knew government existed...
On the whole, our society might have served pretty well as a standing advertisement for Mr. Jefferson’s notion that the virtues which he regarded as distinctively American thrive best in the absence of government.
The schools in our town were somewhat worse than none, and I did not attend them, but had hitherto gone on with my studies in the same happy-go-lucky fashion as in Brooklyn.
My readings in Greek and Latin had consisted of scraps culled from various works; they were mostly short, and all were appropriate to my age. They dealt with matters well within the compass of a child’s understanding, affairs of ordinary life, ordinary experience; many of them were light, amusing, humorous. This slipshod curriculum was invaluable to me in one respect. It set me on my way to see the men and women of antiquity as I have always since then seen them, not as story-book heroes and heroines, but as people exactly like us.
One is often astonished to see how many there are who seem to know a vast lot of history, but to understand hardly any of it. Nine-tenths of the value of classical studies lies in their power to establish a clear commonsense, matter-of-fact view of human nature and its activities over a continuous stretch of some twenty centuries.
We were made to understand that the burden of education was on us and no one else, least of all on our instructors; they were not there to help us carry it or to praise our efforts, but to see that we shouldered it in proper style and got on with it.
Our academic course was fixed and unchangeable as the everlasting hills. You took it or you left it. A student in one of our undergraduate colleges today would regard it with horror as a straight hand-me-down from Standonck and Noël Béda in “that lousy college” of Montaigu where Ponocrates indignantly refused to place Gargantua, and where Erasmus nearly perished.
Elective courses, majors and minors, “courses in English,” vocational courses, and all that sort of thing, were unknown to us; we had never heard of them. Ours was the last institution in America, I think, except probably some managed by the Jesuits, to stick uncompromisingly by “the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.” Readings and expositions of Greek and Roman literature; mathematics up to the differential calculus; logic; metaphysics; a little work on the sources and history of the English language; these made up the lot.
If you were good for it, you were given a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years, and you were then expected to get out promptly and not come back. The incursions of alumni were most distasteful to the authorities, and were firmly disallowed. If, on the other hand, you were not good enough to stand the appointed strain, it was presumably a matter of God’s will, and nothing could be done about it.
The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest, most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature known as Homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers nearly twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated oddity’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic, politics, botany, zoölogy, medicine, geography, theology,—everything, I believe, that lies in the range of human knowledge or speculation.
Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind.
It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative, because beyond all others their effect was powerfully maturing.
This, then, was the first advantage, usually overlooked, which our régime gave us; it was the means of our absorbing a vast deal of vicarious experience which ripened our minds; and as I said, I do not know of any other discipline which could have done just that.
The second advantage usually overlooked is that a non lucendo, our equipment was as valuable to us for what it did not equip us with as for what it did. We left college ignorant of practically everything but what came within the lines of study which I have mentioned. We knew nothing of the natural sciences this side of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny; nothing of any history since A.D. 1500, not even the history of our own country. Our ignorance of other subjects was quite as complete. Therefore when subsequently a new idea or a new set of circumstances presented itself to us, it had free entrance to an unpreoccupied mind.
There was no accumulated lumber of prepossession or formula to be cleared away. Like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of the king’s garment, we saw it as it was, not as somebody had told us it was, or as we thought it might be or ought to be; and at the same time we had a great fund of vicarious experience at hand to help us judge it correctly and make correct inferences from it.
Plato made it the mark of an educated man that he should be able, and above all that he should always be willing, to “see things as they are.”
Our [college education] régime did as much to put that mark on us as any educational régime could do, and more, I believe, than any other will ever do. It did its very powerful best to save us from what the great Stoic philosopher deplored as “the madness and the misery of one who uses the appearance of things as the measure of their reality, and makes a mess of it.”
Thus I believe our régime abundantly vindicated its character as a preparation for living. One might put it that our education served the function of Mr. Titbottom’s spectacles, which George William Curtis described in his exquisite little prose idyl called Prue and I. When Mr. Titbottom looked through his lenses, the appearance of the object he was looking at instantly vanished, and he saw its stark reality.
Incidentally (or was it so? I should be disposed to say primarily rather than incidentally, but if the reader has scruples I do not insist),—incidentally, then, our education also served us well in a moral way; and here our parallel with Mr. Titbottom continues. Sometimes the reality of things was more agreeable to Mr. Titbottom than their appearance; sometimes less so; sometimes it was hideous and horrible, as when he looked at an eminent financier and saw a ruthless and ravening wild boar. But after having used his spectacles occasionally for a while, he developed an insatiable appetite for reality.
Whatever the object he looked at, whatever the cost of possible disillusionment, he could not rest content until he had put on his spectacles and seen it as it was. Even when the lovely Preciosa came in his range of vision,—but the story ends there abruptly, leaving only the suggestion that Mr. Titbottom may have found Preciosa’s reality in some respect seriously dissatisfying.
By one means or another, however, it was so that we did come out with a fairly clear notion that the deliberate acceptance of appearances, the conscious exclusion of reality, is a distinct failure in integrity, a moral failure.
All complaints against the unsatisfactory course of the post-revolutionary régime can be run back to the continuous effort, by some miracle of ingenuity or luck, to translate a bad theory into good practice. The worst result of this was a complete effacement of the line which sets off education from training, and the line which sets off formative knowledge from instrumental knowledge. This obliteration was done deliberately to meet the popular perversions of equality and democracy
The régime perceived that while very few can be educated, everyone who is not actually imbecile or idiotic can be trained in one way or another, as soldiers are trained in military routine, or as monkeys are trained to pick fruit.
Very well then, it said in effect, let us agree to call training education, convert our schools, colleges, universities into training-schools as far as need be, but continue to call them educational institutions and to call our general system an educational system.
We will insist that the discipline of instrumental studies is as formative as any other, even more so, and to quite as good purpose, in fact much better. We will get up courses in “business administration,” bricklaying, retail shoe-merchandising, and what-not, agree to call our graduates educated men, give them all the old-style academic degrees, dress them out in the old-style gowns and hoods,—and there we are, thoroughly democratic, thoroughly equalitarian, in shape to meet all popular demands.
For the looks of the thing, nevertheless, something had to be done to make some sort of show of cultural balance to all this; and here the régime was in difficulties. Its institutions were loaded up with great masses of ineducable persons, and it was necessary to find something for them to do which they could do; and in a cultural way they could do nothing.
Presumably, however, they were literate; that is, they could make their way more or less ignorantly and uncertainly down a printed page; and therefore innumerable “courses in English” were devised for them.
To me, this was the most amusing démarche in the whole revolutionary programme, for as I said somewhere back in these memoirs, we would not have known what courses in English were. Nobody taught English in our day; or rather, everybody taught it all the time. If we expressed ourselves in slipshod English, unidiomatic English, we heard about it on the spot, so we made a point of being careful...
As far as my observation goes, the new régime’s discipline, for all its incredible litter of “courses in English,” does not give nearly so good an account of itself as ours did. I was once in a position where for four years I encountered a steady succession of persons who had “majored in English,” “specialised in English,” or even, Gott soll hüten, taken a master’s degree in English.
After sampling a good fair taste of their quality, I got into the way of telling them I would take their word for all they knew about English, since obviously the one thing they did not know was what to do with it, and that was the only thing that interested me.
The final end and aim of education is the ability to see things as they are...
What is man? On one theory of man’s place in nature, the final answer would be yes, and on another, no. The immediate answer, however, I should say would be in the negative. In a society essentially neolithic, as ours unquestionably is at the moment,—whatever one may hold its evolutionary possibilities to be,—there can be no place found for an educable person but such as a trainable person could fill quite as well or even better; he becomes a superfluous man; and the more thoroughly his ability to see things as they are is cultivated, the more his superfluity is enhanced.
As the process of general barbarisation goes on, as its speed accelerates, as its calamitous consequences recur with ever-increasing frequency and violence, the educable person can only take shelter against his insensate fellow-beings, as Plato says, like a man crouching behind a wall against a whirlwind.
The unfailing luck which attended me throughout my nonage, and indeed through most of my life thereafter, held good in one most important respect to which I have not yet alluded. I am profoundly thankful that during my formative years I never had contact with any institution under State control; not in school, not in college, nor yet in my three years of irregular graduate study. No attempt was ever made by any one to indoctrinate me with State-inspired views,—or any views, for that matter,—of patriotism or nationalism.
I was never dragooned into flag-worship or hero-worship, never was caught in any spate of verbiage about duty to one’s country, never debauched by any of the routine devices hatched by scoundrels for inducing a synthetic devotion to one’s native land and loyalty to its jobholders.
Therefore when later the various aspects of contemporary patriotism and nationalism appeared before me, my mind was wholly unprepossessed, and my view of them was unaffected by any emotional distortion. I could see them as through Mr. Titbottom’s spectacles; I could see them as they are.
I read a remarkable work called Degeneration, written by the able Hungarian Jew, Max Nordau. In it he described this contemporary spirit as
a mixture of febrile restlessness and defeatist discouragement, of fear for the future and sulking resignation. The prevalent sense is one of impending destruction and extinction.... In our time the more highly-developed minds have been visited with vague forebodings of a Dusk of the Nations, in which the sunlight and starlight are gradually fading, and the human race with all its institutions and achievements is dying out amidst a dying world.
This put the spirit of the period very well, very correctly. The one description of it which is incomparable in its perfection, however, was accidental; its application was not intentional. It is found in the dream of Aratov, in Clara Militch, Tourgueniev’s last and greatest work:
He dreamed that he was in a rich manor-house, of which he was the owner. He had lately bought both the house and the estate attached to it. And he kept thinking, ‘It’s nice, very nice now, but evil is coming!’ Beside him moved to and fro a little tiny man, his steward; he kept laughing, bowing, and trying to show Aratov how admirably everything was arranged in his house and his estate. ‘This way, pray, this way, pray,’ he kept repeating, chuckling at every word; ‘kindly look how prosperous everything is with you! Look at the horses; what splendid horses!’ And Aratov saw a row of immense horses. They were standing in their stalls with their backs to him. Their manes and tails were magnificent; but as soon as Aratov went near, the horses’ heads turned towards him, and they showed their teeth viciously. ‘It’s very nice,’ Aratov thought, ‘but evil is coming!’ ‘This way, pray, this way,’ the steward repeated again, ‘pray come into the garden; look, what fine apples you have.’ The apples certainly were sfine, red and round, but as soon as Aratov looked at them they withered and fell. ‘Evil is coming!’ he thought. ‘And here is the lake,’ lisped the steward. ‘Isn’t it blue and smooth? And here’s a little boat of gold,—will you get into it?—it floats of itself.’ ‘I won’t get into it,’ thought Aratov; ‘evil is coming!’ but for all that he got into the boat. At the bottom lay huddled up a little creature like a monkey; it was holding in its paws a glass full of a dark liquid. ‘Pray don’t be uneasy,’ the steward shouted from the bank. ‘It’s of no consequence. It’s death. Good luck to you!’
For the great majority, the last decade of the century seemed to offer every encouragement to complacent hopefulness. All the institutional voices of society were blended to form the sycophantic reassurances of Aratov’s steward...
The Western world’s estate was rich and prosperous. The horses’ manes and tails were magnificent, the apples were fine, red and round. “It’s nice, very nice now”; and yet,—and yet,—the vague undefined sense of impermanence and instability persisted. [...] “The more highly-developed minds” in all countries were saying plainly that the social product of these forces was utterly unworthy to be called civilisation; and they were predicting that soon, very soon, the passenger in the golden boat would hear the perfidious steward shouting, “Pray don’t be uneasy. It’s of no consequence. It’s death. Good luck to you!”
My course of reading, initiated by Nordau’s work and supplemented by observation of current affairs as well as by my conversations with C. J., impressed on me the basic fact that western society was entirely given over to economism. (This word is not in any dictionary, as far as I know. I use it because my only alternative is materialism, which is ambiguous and inexact.)
It had no other philosophy; apparently it did not know there was any other. It interpreted the whole of human life in terms of the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth. Like certain Philippians in the time of St. Paul, its god was its belly, and it had no mind for anything beyond the ἐπίγεια.
I learned that as far as American society was concerned, this had been so ever since the days of Columbus. Michel Chevalier, the most acute observer among the many who had visited America in its youth, said that American society had the morale of an army on the march. It had the morale of the looter, the plunderer.
Now I was looking at the great avatars of their practical philosophy, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Fricks, Hills, Huntingtons, of the period. I asked myself whether any amount of wealth would be worth having if,—as one most evidently must,—if one had to become just like these men in order to get it. To me, at least, decidedly it would not; I should be a superfluous man in the scuffle for riches. I observed their qualities and practices closely, considered the furniture of their minds, remarked their scale of values, and could come to no other conclusion.
Well, then, could a society built to a complete realisation of every ideal of the economism they represented be permanently satisfactory to the best reason and spirit of man? Could it be called a civilised society?
The thing seemed preposterous, absurd; I recalled Teufelsdröckh’s simile of “an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others.” After wealth, science, invention, had done all for such a society that they could do, it would remain without savour, without depth, uninteresting, and withal horrifying.
Thus, while considering the phenomena of economism and modern imperialism, I was also led to observe the concurrent growth of what long afterward I learned to call Statism.
Within the last half-century in England, France and Germany, the State had been continually absorbing through taxation more and more of the national wealth, continually assuming one new coercive, regulative or directive function after another. In the United States the same process had begun to be speeded up to a headlong rapidity.
Everywhere these wholesale confiscations of social power were going on; everywhere social power was being depleted, and everywhere State power being increased at its expense.
Along with this tendency went a curious tacit rationalisation of it, under the dogma of Statism as propounded by the German idealist philosophers of the eighteenth century. C. J. introduced me to the basic political theory of these gentry, and the closeness of its correspondence with the popular belief now everywhere prevailing rather took my breath away.
The individual has no rights that the State is bound to respect; no rights at all, in fact, except those which the State may choose to give him, subject to revocation at its own pleasure, with or without notice.
There is no such thing as natural rights; the fundamental doctrine of the American Declaration of Independence, the doctrine underlying the Bill of Rights, is all moonshine. Moreover, since the State creates all rights, since the only valid and authoritative ethics are State ethics, then by obvious inference the State can do no wrong.
Such was the view with which the peoples of the Western world had become indoctrinated..
Stuart Mill and others, had little effect. In July, 1898, he wrote in a letter to Grant Allen, “... I said, just as you say, that we are in course of re-barbarisation, and that there is no prospect but that of military despotisms, which we are rapidly approaching.”
I knew that no society ever did or could exist without employing capital, and my notion was that wherever capital is at work, there of necessity is capitalism and a capitalist system. As I saw it, there was nothing in the nature of capital that was unjust or oppressive, but quite the contrary.
I could see that injustice and oppression were likely to follow when great capitalists were in a position of State-created economic advantage, like Mr. Carnegie with his tariffs or the “railway-magnates” with their land-grants; but the same results seemed as likely to follow where small capitalists or non-capitalists were in a similarly privileged position.
Spencer’s Social Statics, published in 1851, had shown me that under such a government as he contemplated,—a government divested of all power to traffic in economic advantage,— injustice and oppression would tend to disappear. As long as the State stood as an approachable huckster of privilege, however, there seemed no chance but that they must persist, and that the consequent social disorder must persist also.
If I had been asked for a definition at that time [...] I should have put it that the mass-man is a digestive and reproductive mechanism, gifted with a certain low sagacity employable upon anything which bears upon the conduct of those two functions. If he is overgifted with this sagacity and has a measure of luck, he becomes a rich mass-man; if not, he becomes a poor mass-man; but in either case he remains a mass-man.
When one brushed aside the reformers’ verbiage, the situation was perfectly clear. I was not witnessing a “revolt of the masses” against an alien power; nor yet a war between labour and capital; nor yet a struggle to break up big business; nor yet an attempt to abolish capitalism. What I was looking at was simply a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one large and poor, the other small and rich, and as judged by the standards of a civilised society, neither of them any more meritorious or promising than the other.
The object of the tussle was the material gains accruing from control of the State’s machinery. It is easieto seize wealth than to produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalised privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.
There were two exceptions, hardly to be called reformers, Herbert Quick and Brand Whitlock. Quick was always, I believe, on the extreme outer fringe of the reforming party, and centrifugal force soon threw Whitlock as far out. Quick clearly saw the State as an anti-social institution; he saw that as primarily the arbiter of economic advantage and a potential instrument of exploitation, both its initial intent and function are anti-social.
He was the only person I knew in that period who drew the line of distinction sharply between the idea of government, as set forth by Mr. Jefferson in the Declaration and amplified by Paine and Spencer, and the idea of the State as demonstrated in the historical researches of Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer.
As far as the individual was concerned, all State systems seemed to tend about equally towards the same end of State-slavery. In rich countries, as Mr. Jefferson had noticed, they reached that end a little faster than in poor countries, but I could make out no other difference.
I was much impressed by France’s remarkable experience; it seemed to me one of the most exhibitory experiences in history, though I did not find any one who was taking it as such. In a single century after 1789, France had tried every known kind of State-system, some two or three times over; three republics, a couple of monarchies, two empires, now and then a dictatorship, a directory, a commune—every system one could think of.
Each shift brought about the same consequences to the individual, and they all alike bore testimony to the truth of Paine’s saying, that
the trade of governing has always been a monopoly of the most ignorant and the most vicious of mankind.
I often wondered why this sequence of systems in France had not given rise to more speculation about the actual net value of any one political system over another. If it had given rise to any, I did not hear of it.
There it was, precisely. I could see how “democracy” might do very well in a society of saints and sages led by an Alfred or an Asntoninus Pius. Short of that, I was unable to see how it could come to anything but an *ochlocracy* of mass-men led by a sagacious knave. The collective capacity for bringing forth any other outcome seemed simply not there.
To my eyes the incident of Aristides and the Athenian mass-man was perfectly exhibitory of “democracy” in practice.
Socrates could not have got votes enough out of the Athenian mass-men to be worth counting, but Eubulus easily could, and did, wangle enough to keep himself in office as long as the corrupt fabric of the Athenian State held together. As against a Jesus, the historic choice of the mass-man goes regularly to some Barabbas.
I was at lunch in the Uptown Club of New York with an old friend, Edward Epstean, a retired man of affairs. I do not remember what subject was under discussion at the moment; but whatever it was, it led to Mr. Epstean’s shaking a forefinger at me, and saying with great emphasis, “I tell you, *if self-preservation is the first law of human conduct, exploitation is the second.”
This remark instantly touched off a tremendous flashlight in my mind. I saw the generalisation which had been staring me in the face for years without my having sense enough to recognise and identify it.
Spencer and Henry George had familiarised me with the formula that man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion; but they had given me no idea of its immense scope, its almost illimitable range of action.
If this formula were sound, as unquestionably it is, then certainly exploitation would be an inescapable corollary, because the easiest way to satisfy one’s needs and desires is by exploitation.
Indeed, if one wished to split hairs, one might say that exploitation is the first law of conduct, since even in self-preservation one tends always to take the easiest way; but the question of precedence is a small matter.
As a phenomenon of finance, it had long been observed that “bad money drives out good,” but Sir Thomas Gresham reduced these observations to order under a formula as simple as Newton’s, and this formula is known as Gresham’s law. So for an analogous service, more important than Gresham’s and, as far as this planet is concerned, as comprehensive as Newton’s, I thought that the formula, Man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion, should bear the name of Epstean’s law.
I was indescribably fortunate in getting, as early as I did, a clear sense of the bearing which three great laws of the type known as “natural” have on human conduct. I say fortunate, for it was by good fortune alone, and not my own deserving, that I got this sense. By luck I stumbled on the discovery that Epstean’s law, Gresham’s law, and the law of diminishing returns operate as inexorably in the realm of culture; of politics; of social organisation, religious and secular; as they do in the realm of economics. This understanding enabled me at once to get the hang of many matters which far better men than I have found hopelessly puzzling, and to answer questions for which otherwise I could have found no answer.
For example, I have already shown in these pages how the current value of literature is determined by the worst type of literature in circulation—Gresham’s law.
Is not the value of education determined in the same way? I think there can be no doubt of it. Why did the projects of the reformers fail? Why did George’s air-tight proposals fall by the wayside? What brought ruin and desolation in the wake of the “social legislation” championed by the recreant Liberals?
1. Why was it impossible to improve society or the individual through political action?
Simply because all such well-meant enterprises ran hard aground on Epstean’s law<
2. Something like republicanism or “democracy” will work after a fashion in a village or even a township, where everybody knows everybody and keeps an eye on what goes on. Why not, then, in a county, a state, a nation?
Simply because the law of diminishing returns is against it.
3. Will political nationalism, as we understand it, ever be made satisfactory or permanently practicable?
Not as long as Epstean’s law and the law of diminishing returns remain in force, for no one yet has ciphered out a way to beat them.
Hence I saw nothing for it but that a republican society must follow the historic pattern of gradual rise to a fairly high level of power and prestige, and then a rather sudden lapse into dissolution and displacement in favour of some other society which in turn would follow the same pattern.
And so it was that at the age of thirty-five or so I dismissed all interest in public affairs, and have regarded them ever since as a mere spectacle, mostly a comedy, rather squalid, rather hackneyed, whereof I already knew the plot from beginning to end.
If Mr. Cram had anything better to offer, if he could throw any light on that egregious problem, he was distinctly the man I wanted to see. The essay has been reprinted in his excellent book called Convictions and Controversies, which deserves the highest recommendation to careful readers.
Mr. Cram’s thesis is that we do not behave like human beings because the great majority of us, the masses of mankind, are not human beings. We have all along assumed that the zoölogical classification of man is also a competent psychical classification; that all creatures having the physical attributes which put them in the category of Homo sapiens also have the psychical attributes which put them in the category of human beings; and this, Mr. Cram says, is wholly unwarranted and an error of the first magnitude.
Consequently we have all along been putting expectations upon the masses of Homo sapiens which they are utterly incapable of meeting. We have accepted them as psychically-human, dealt with them on that assumption, and expected a corresponding psychical reaction, when actually nothing of the sort is possible. They are merely the sub-human raw material out of which the occasional human being is produced by an evolutionary process as yet unexplained, but no doubt catastrophic in character, certainly not progressive. Hence, inasmuch as they are the raw material of humanity, they are inestimably precious....
My acceptance of Mr. Cram’s theory also caused me for the first time really to like people-at-large. Before that I had frankly disliked people in the mass, though never unkindly.
One can hate human beings, at least I could,—I hated a lot of them when that is what I thought they were,—but one can’t hate sub-human creatures or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them unkindly. If an animal is treacherous, you avoid him but can’t hate him, for that is the way he is. If cattle tramp down your garden, you drive them away but can’t hate them, because you know they are acting up to the measure of their psychical capacity...
Nevertheless, the fact does remain that on any other theory than his it is impossible for a reflective mind to regard our species otherwise than with disgust and loathing and contempt.
This decision [to move to Europe] brought me in sight of the curious notion which Mr. Pearsall Smith observed as prevailing in American society, that a person who leaves America for reasons like mine is somehow unpatriotic and disloyal. I could not understand this, and the more I reflected on it the more mechanical and unintelligent this view of patriotism appeared to be. What is patriotism?
Is it loyalty to a spot on a map, marked off from other spots by blue or yellow lines, the spot where one Was born? But birth is a pure accident; surely one is in no way responsible for having been born on this spot or on that.
Is it loyalty to a set of political jobholders, a king and his court, a president and his bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a Duce or Führer, a camorra of commissars? I should say it depends entirely on what the jobholders are like and what they do. Certainly I had never seen any who commanded my loyalty; I should feel utterly degraded if ever once I thought they could.
Does patriotism mean loyalty to a political system and its institutions, constitutional, autocratic, republican, or what-not?
But if history has made anything unmistakably clear, it is that from the standpoint of the individual and his welfare, these are no more than names The reality which in the end they are found to cover is the same for all alike. If a tree be known by its fruits, which I believe is regarded as good sound doctrine, then the peculiar merit of a system, if it has any, ought to be reflected in the qualities and conditions of the people who live under it; and looking over the peoples and systems of the world, I found no reason in the nature of things why a person should be loyal to one system rather than another. One could see at a glance that there is no saving grace in any system. Whatever merit or demerit may attach to any of them lies in the way it is administered.
So when people speak of loyalty to one’s country, one must ask them what they mean by that What is one’s country?
Mr. Jefferson said contemptuously that “merchants have no country; the mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”
But one may ask, why should it? This motive of patriotism seems to me perfectly sound, and if it be sound for merchants, why not for others who are not merchants? If it holds good in respect of material gains, why not of spiritual gains, cultural gains, intellectual and æsthetic gains?
As a general principle, I should put it that a man’s country is where the things he loves are most respected.
Burke touches this matter of patriotism with a searching phrase. “For us to love our country,” he said, “our country ought to be lovely.”
It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services; but twenty years ago this axiom vanished from everyone’s reckoning, and has never reappeared.
No one has seemed in the least aware that everything which is paid for must be paid for out of production, for there is no other source of payment.
Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. Its existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. “Government money,” of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing...
The sum of my observations was that during the last twenty years money has been largely diverted from its function as a mere convenience, a medium of exchange, a sort of general claim-check on production, and has been slily knaved into an instrument of political power.
Our system was founded in all good faith that universal elementary education would make a citizenry more intelligent; whereas most obviously it has done nothing of the kind...
Aside from this negative result, I saw that our system had achieved a positive result. If it had done nothing to raise the general level of intelligence, it had succeeded in making our citizenry much more easily gullible. It tended powerfully to focus the credulousness of Homo sapiens upon the printed word, and to confirm him in the crude authoritarian or fetishistic spirit which one sees most highly developed, perhaps, in the habitual reader of newspapers.
By being inured to taking as true whatever he read in his schoolbooks and whatever his teachers told him, he is bred to a habit of unthinking acquiescence, rather than to an exercise of such intelligence as he may have.
I have always been profoundly grateful for my luck in having been enabled in my early youth to understand that education is one thing and training quite another, and thus to avoid the vicious errors resulting from confusion of the two terms.
It can not be too often reiterated that education is a process contemplating intelligence and wisdom, and employing formative knowledge for its purposes;
while training is a process contemplating sagacity and cleverness, and employing instrumental knowledge for its purposes.
Education, properly applied to suitable material, produces something in the way of an Emerson; while training, properly applied to suitable material, produces something in the way of an Edison.
Here then, in the inordinate lack of balance between these two sets of forces,—sagacity and cleverness on the one hand, intelligence and wisdom on the other,—I perceived a valid reason why the social agglomerations of mankind are so unstable.
They can be stabilised only by the continuous exercise of a very considerable and generally-diffused intelligence and wisdom; and these are simply not to be had, they do not exist, have never existed, and at present one sees no prospect that they ever will. Homo sapiens has already gone so astonishingly far in the progress which Goethe predicted, without any corresponding advance in intelligence and wisdom, as to make it easily conceivable that in the long-run he may perish through his own inventions.
FROM what I have now written I think one may easily see how it came about that by the time I was in my early thirties I found myself settled in convictions which I suppose might be summed up as a philosophy of intelligent selfishness, intelligent egoism, intelligent hedonism. It may be seen also how subsequent observation and reflection confirmed me in this philosophy....
My findings are too simple and commonplace for anything like that. If it were obligatory to put a label on them, I should say, with Goethe’s well-known remark in mind, that they amount merely to a philosophy of informed common sense.
But putting all such authority aside, I hold it to be a matter of invariable experience that no one can do anything for anybody.
Somebody may profit by something you do, you may know that he profits and be glad of it, but you do not do it for him. You do it, as Augustine says you must do it, are bound to do it (necesse est is the strong term he uses), because you get more satisfaction, happiness, delight, out of doing it than you would get out of not doing it; and this is egoistic hedonism.
By consequence I hold that no one ever did, or can do, anything for “society.”
When the great general movement towards collectivism set in, about the middle of the last century, “society,” rather than the individual, became the criterion of hedonists like Bentham, Hume, J. S. Mill. The greatest happiness of society was first to be considered, because in that the individual would find a condition conducive to his greatest happiness.
Comte invented the term altruism as an antonym for egoism, and it found its way at once into everyone’s mouth, although it is utterly devoid of meaning, since it points to nothing that ever existed in mankind.
The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit. In a word, ages of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method which Jesus apparently regarded as the only one whereby the Kingdom of Heaven can be established as a going concern; that is, the method of each one doing his very best to improve one.
In practice, however, this method is extremely difficult; there can be no question about that, for experience will prove it so. It is also clear that very few among mankind have either the force of intellect to manage this method intelligently, or the force of character to apply it constantly....
It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organise something, to institutionalise this-or-that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure-groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory.
The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for six thousand years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again.
Like the general run of American children, I grew up under the impression that mankind have an innate and deep-seated love of liberty. This was never taught me as an article of faith, but in one way and another, mostly from pseudo-patriotic books and songs, children picked up a vague notion that “the priceless boon of liberty” is really a very fine thing, that mankind love it and are jealous of it to the point of raising Cain if it be denied them; also that America makes a great speciality of liberty and is truly the land of the free...
I first became uncertain about these tenets through reading ancient accounts of the great libertarian wars of history...
If mankind really have an unquenchable love for freedom, I thought it strange that I saw so little evidence of it; and as a matter of fact, from that day to this I have seen none worth noticing.
One is bound to wonder why it is, since people usually set some value on what they love, that among those who are presumed to be so fond of freedom the possession of it is so little appreciated. Taking the great cardinal example lying nearest at hand, the American people once had their liberties; they had them all; but apparently they could not rest o’nights until they had turned them over to a prehensile crew of professional politicians.
I tell you, man has no preoccupation more nagging than to find the person to whom that unhappy creature may surrender the gift of freedom with which he is born.For more, see Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, the chapter titled "The Grand Inquisitor". You can find a brief review of it by Jacques Barzun on this page: Books by Fedor Dostoevsky
According to my observations, mankind are among the most easily tamable and domesticable of all creatures in the animal world. They are readily reducible to submission, so readily conditionable (to coin a word) as to exhibit an almost incredibly enduring patience under restraint and oppression of the most flagrant character.
So far are they from displaying any overweening love of freedom that they show a singular contentment with a condition of servitorship, often showing a curious canine pride in it, and again often simply unaware that they are existing in that condition.