Читать книгу The Unfinished Programme of Democracy - Richard Roberts - Страница 12

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The aims of our social polity must, therefore, be defined congruously with the nature of personality; and the corresponding social processes must validate themselves by bringing to those whom they affect, the sense of movement towards a real and recognisable personal good. It does not require that all the individuals composing a society should organise their common life with the conscious and deliberate aim of personal self-realisation; but it is certain that the processes of a genuine social integration will be accompanied by a certain growing emotional satisfaction in the persons concerned. It is generally assumed that this emotional satisfaction is to be described as happiness; but it is probably something deeper and more organic than the state which this word connotes. Professor Dewey says that “to find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key of happiness.”^[9] This is, of course, true so far as it goes; but it is symptomatic of the inadequate analysis which this point generally receives. Obviously there are possibilities of self-realisation and personal satisfaction far beyond the attainment which Professor Dewey indicates in this sentence. We might, perhaps, find a better definition of the emotional state which we should require our process of social development to produce, in the New Testament use of the word joy. There the word is clearly associated with an emotional state consequent upon a sense of accomplishment or discovery. The golfer experiences it for a passing moment after a completely successful drive from the tee. The artist knows it more durably as he puts the finishing touch to what he believes to be his masterpiece. Gibbon had it (not without a large tincture of self-admiration) on the memorable evening on which he finished the “Decline and Fall.” It is the condition which is described by the word “fruition;”^[10] the inward reaction evoked by the sense of arrival, of fulfilment, and of course—derivatively—of being surely on the way. It comes to a man when he knows he is on the road to personal completeness.

9. Democracy and Education, p. 360.

10. This word is so frequently mishandled that it is perhaps necessary to point out that it does not mean bearing fruit. It is derived from the Latin word fruor, I enjoy; and it describes an inward state.

Illustrative of the New Testament use of the word joy, the following passages may be cited: John ii. 30, “This my joy is made full” (spoken by John Baptist on hearing that Jesus was launched on the full tide of His ministry.) John xvi. 21, “… when she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a man is born unto the world.” Matt. xiii. 14, “In his joy, he goeth and selleth all that he hath” (the merchant man who has found the pearl of great price). Luke xv. 9, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.”

It is upon the question of what constitutes personal completeness that we have to reach some kind of conclusion if our sociological thinking is to be fruitful and if we are to have the proper tests to apply to our social programmes. Obviously the society we want to produce is one which will provide the conditions under which every man may rise to the full stature of his manhood. But what is the full-grown man? Apparently the only person in the modern world who has possessed a definite and vivid conception of the full-grown man is Nietzsche. But Nietzsche’s doctrine is ruled out by our democratic hypothesis. He has told us that mankind falls into two broad classes of master and slave, and though he recognises a considerable hierarchy of social grades, he sees, nevertheless, at the one end the ruling class, and at the other “the class of man who thrives best when he is looked after and closely observed, the man who is happy to serve not because he must, but because he is what he is, the man uncorrupted by political and religious lies concerning liberty, equality and fraternity, who is half conscious of the abyss which separates him from his superiors, and who is happiest when he is performing those acts which are not beyond his limitations.”^[11] Obviously the only kind of society possible on the Nietzschean terms is an armed peace between supermen and “slave morality” for the rest. The will to power soon or late issues in anarchy. The strength of the position of Nietzsche lies in the theoretic justification it provides for the native human bias which leads to the quest of personal ascendency, and the struggle for possession. The result of this tendency has been the constant subordination and exploitation of the weak by the strong, and a ceaseless scrimmage among the strong in which the weak are the pawns; and if this struggle has not brought about the Nietzschean equilibrium, it is due, presumably, to the enervating influence of Christianity. Yet, here, in this self-regarding bias we have the original source of all our social chaos; but the disorder is not to be overcome by inhibiting this impulse. It is sometimes supposed that human nature is incurably and permanently self-regarding and anarchic; but this is not true. It is indeed true that human nature does take easily to the practice of self-assertion as against others; this is the penalty of our inheritance from the “ape and the tiger.” But it is mere folly to suppose that man has to carry this sorrowful entail in perpetuity. It is fastened on him largely by reason of the external circumstances of his life, a vicious social heredity which has put a premium upon power and pushfulness, and an atmosphere of competition in which capacity and cunning win the prize. It is, however, not impossible to communicate to men a social vision which is able to divert the natural energies of the human spirit into more generous channels. This, did they but know it, is the peculiar vocation of the preacher and the teacher.

11. A. M. Ludovici, Nietszche, pp. 85f.

Mr. Bertrand Russell has recently laid just emphasis upon the supremacy of impulse in determining human conduct; and has pointed out the distinction between impulses which make for life and those which make for death. William Blake had a somewhat similar view. What Blake in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” calls energy appears to be that vital stress which expresses itself in our impulses, and which in the form of “poetic” energy is the source of creative art. In Blake’s psychology, this energy only works out healthily and fruitfully when it is co-ordinated on the one side with Reason and on the other by Desire; and he traces our human troubles to an undue ascendency of one or other of these two balancing principles. When Reason prevails over Desire, it imposes disastrous restraint upon energy; but when the tables are turned, the ascendency of Desire leads to the “vegetated life.” Blake’s analysis has much to commend it; and it appears to supply the necessary complement to Mr. Russell’s. For our impulses, whether they make for life or death are the same impulses—the difference in their result springing from a difference in their direction, and in the conditions under which they operate.

The old psychological analysis of the mind into will, intellect, affections, and so forth has served its turn; and for purposes of social building we must betake ourselves rather to an analysis of Blake’s energy or Mr. Russell’s impulses. M. Bergson has shown us how the “elan vitale” has in the course of its onward march split up again and again, and in so doing has set afoot new lines of development and variation; and we have for result the infinite wealth of plant and animal form which fills the earth. The primitive urge of life was seemingly a bundle of tendencies, which were released, one at this point, and another at that, under the stress of the circumstances encountered on the way. In the same way the energy, the vital stress of personality is an organic complex of impulses, each of which has released and shaped itself conformably to the conditions in which the human spirit has found itself in the process of growth. In this complex of impulses, it is possible to discern three main strands:

1. The Impulse of Self-preservation. This has to do with the desire and purpose to maintain life; and its primitive form was determined by the necessity of procuring food, clothing and shelter. Its characteristic activity was that of discovering and adapting the means which were available to the end of sustaining life; and out of this grew agriculture, weaving, housebuilding and a range of operations which grew in number and elaboration as the requirements of life increased. Here is the origin of what Mr. Veblen has called the Instinct of Workmanship.

2. The Impulse of Reproduction. This in its elemental form expresses itself in the begetting of children. But as man became more familiar with the objects round about him, in the course of handling them for the ends of self-preservation, this impulse became associated with the instinct of workmanship, and man began to attempt to reproduce himself in other media than his flesh. He came to do certain work which was not required by the exigencies of his physical subsistence; and this work he did—as it were—for the joy of doing it. He attempted to express himself upon such materials as were capable of receiving his impress; and his delight in his handicraft became the beginning of Art. Presently he learnt to set line and colour and sound in combinations that pleased him, and in which he was conscious of the joy of fatherhood. This is the Instinct of Creativeness. It is not always perceived that there is a very profound distinction to be drawn between the workmanlike and the creative activities. Miss Helen Marot appears to assume (in her book The Creative Impulse in Industry), that a democratic form of co-operation, and an understanding of industrial processes will satisfy the creative instinct in industry. It is difficult to see how this can happen under the conditions of the modern large-scale machine industry. Miss Marot rightly insists that the creative impulse is not merely an affair of individual self-expression. Nevertheless, it is only possible to a group when the group is comparatively small, and every member is in active touch with the whole process. The instinct of workmanship is of a routine productive character, the instinct of creativeness is original and reproductive. Nothing on this earth can make our highly specialised machine processes into opportunities of self-expression. This, however, does not mean that the machine industry has no place in the future social order.

3. The Impulse of Association.—Man has always lived with men; and there is perhaps nothing so distinctive of human nature as its faculty for association. We are so made that we only find ourselves and each other as we live together in societies, that we only find ourselves as we find one another. The exchanges of love and friendship, the riches of fellowship—these are the most fruitful experiences of life. “We are members of one another”; and are fulfilled in each other. Our mutual need has released in us the Instinct of Sociability.

The weakness of this kind of analysis is that it appears to untwine threads that cannot be untwined in practice and never are separated in experience. Human instincts do not operate independently; they blend into each other continuously and inextricably in countless ways. We have seen how the reproductive impulse fused with the instinct of workmanship into an impulse toward creative art. But the debt has been repaid in the introduction of requirements of beauty into the exercise of workmanship. In the era of craftsmanship, the two impulses were very intimately blended, workmanship and creativeness going hand in hand in the erection of stately minsters, or in the making of harness for the squire’s horses. It is due to the development of the machine that these two impulses have been so widely parted in our time, to the immense injury of both; and it is one of the tasks, perhaps the chief of the tasks, facing us in the future to restore them to something of their old-time intimacy. Of this restoration, the great modern prophet is William Morris, who saw hope neither for the worker nor for the artist except in a closer association of industry with beauty, and who laid the foundation of this revived association by his own pioneer work as a house-decorator. This does not require, as some suppose, the scrapping of the machine industry, even though that were possible; it only requires that we understand the true place of the machine industry and put it there. Similarly, the instinct of sociability coalesced with those of workmanship and creativeness. The signal instance of this combination is to be found in the spirit of the mediæval Guilds; but there are other instances in plenty. Most of the great human achievements in thought, religion and art, have had a social origin, in schools of philosophers and prophets, in groups of artists and the like, and conversely new departures in thought, religion and art have become the foci of new groups.

Of all this the moral would seem to be that we must treat the energy of personality, its characteristic outgoing, as a single undivided indivisible stream; yet we must recognise it also as a stream containing a certain range of ingredients. Therefore, what we shall require of our ideal society is that it shall generate an atmosphere and an environment in which the constituent ingredients of personal energy shall find opportunity of full, co-ordinated and parallel development. It will be a society in which the instinct of workmanship, creativeness and sociability will grow side by side and hand in hand toward “the perfect man, of the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

Of this society then, we may say, that its marks will be that first every man shall have the opportunity of a secure and sufficient physical subsistence, second, that its work will press upward to the plane of art, and that its sociability will grow into vital and purposeful fellowship. By these tests we shall judge the soundness of democratic progress.

Our analysis has hitherto taken account only of the common man without reference to natural divergencies of genius or capacity. Professor Geddes has lately been emphasising Comte’s doctrine of history as an interplay of the temporal and spiritual powers, and his classification of the four Social types—Chiefs, People, Emotionals and Intellectuals. Mr. Arnold Bennett found men on the Clyde sorting themselves out into Organisers, Workers, Energisers and Initiators, which classification, as Professor Geddes justly points out, corresponds closely to Comte’s. These types, however, reduce themselves to two, namely those chiefly animated by the impulse of action, and those chiefly animated by the impulse of reflection. Of course, these types shade off imperceptibly into one another, because the impulses which give them their peculiar colour are native to and present in universal human nature. And while it is certain that nature will see to it that mankind will be delivered from the doom of a dead uniformity, it is nevertheless necessary that we should aim at the full development of both the active and reflective impulses in every man. Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets! Hitherto, we have considered man as actuated mainly by the impulse of action; but the release and development of the impulse of reflection is essential to the growth of society. For the experience which is the sequel of action is condemned to sterility except it be reflected upon. Reflection upon experience is the appointed guide of further action. We must, therefore, add to our tests of sound democratic progress, a fourth, namely, that it shall be of a kind to stimulate and encourage reflection. It must, that is, include a method of education whereby every man shall as far as possible become capable of independent thought and sound judgment.

Out of all this emerges immediately one certain conclusion. The kind of society which encourages creative self-expression, independent judgment and a living expanding fellowship must necessarily be conceived and created in freedom. For to these essential human impulses, freedom is the very breath of life. The initial problem of sociology is, therefore, the achievement of freedom; upon that foundation, and that only, can it build for eternity.