CHAPTER III
SOCIALISM TRUE AND FALSE
In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out the whole--or, at any rate, completely think out definite parts--of the purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education, and all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy.
The man who wrote that is not what is called a whole-hearted man asregards any form of group-action. He does not "fit in." He is at bottoma sceptic, and a sceptic is one who reduces every question to thequestion of human nature. So that the socialism of Wells is necessarilyat variance with all the recognized group-forms of socialism,Administrative, Philanthropic, and Revolutionary. I must brieflyindicate in each case what is the quality of this divergence.
As regards the first, he has a complete distrust of what Hilaire Bellochas called the "Servile State;" and what he distrusts he virulentlydislikes. In his view, Administrative socialism, as it appears in SidneyWebb and the Fabian Society, and in the tendency of contemporaryLiberalism, has led to an excessive conservatism toward the existingmachinery of government, it has depended altogether too much onorganization without popular support, and as a result has tended tothrow the whole force of the socialist movement into a bureaucraticregime of small-minded experts. The activity of the Fabians especially,he says, has set great numbers of socialists working in the oldgovernmental machinery without realizing that the machinery should havebeen reconstructed first. The whole tendency of this method, as it isexhibited in the works of the English Liberal Party of to-day, is towarda socialization of the poor without a corresponding socialization of therich; toward a more and more marked chasm between the regimented workersand the free employers.
And it throws the control of affairs into the hands of a mass of highlyspecialized officials, technical minds, mutually-unenlightened experts.In an age when the progress of society depends upon breaking downprofessional barriers, when the genuine scientist, for instance, is aman who passes beyond his own science and sees the inter-relationshipsof all knowledge, the mind which has been trained in one habitualroutine is the most dangerous type of mind to place in authority. On theone hand, society depends upon the cooperation of all sorts ofspecialists, their free discussion, and comparison of methods, results,and aims; on the other experts in office are apt to grow narrow,impatient, and contemptuous, seeing nothing beyond their immediatework,--and this particularly when they have been trained foradministration without any wide experience of the world.
Therefore upon experts as such, in distinction from constructive andcooperating specialists, Wells, with all the force of his belief in theventilating of knowledge and the humanizing of affairs, wages anunceasing war. _The First Men in the Moon_ satirizes, after the fashionof Swift, a world where the expert view of life, not only inadministration but in all work, prevails. Each inhabitant of the Moonhas a single rigidly defined function, to which everything else in hisnature is accommodated. Thus certain types of machine-menders arecompressed in jars, while others are dwarfed to fit them for fine work,"a really more humane proceeding", as Mr. Cavor observes, "than ourmethod of leaving children to grow into human beings and then makingmachines of them." And in _The Great State_ he returns to his attack ongovernment by experts: "Whatever else may be worked out in the subtleranswers our later time prepares, nothing can be clearer than that thenecessary machinery of government must be elaborately organized toprevent the development of a managing caste in permanent conspiracy,tacit or expressed, against the normal man." And he adds: "The GreatState will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a propercircumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certainamateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience ofthe stale official." One of the many and increasing indications, onemight suggest, of the remarkable tendency in Wells to find good in theold humanistic Tory, as distinguished from the modern bureaucraticLiberal, view of life.
But lest I be tempted to carry this latter suggestion too far just atthis point, I pass on to his equally virulent dislike of Philanthropicsocialism and the busy Superior Person in affairs; especially the typeof political woman so dear to Mrs. Humphry Ward's heart. If the expertbureaucratic point of view represents the action of socialist thought onthe Liberal Progressive mind, so also the philanthropic superior pointof view represents the action of socialist thought on the Conservativemind. It is arrogant, aggressive, and condescending. It implies theraising of one's inferiors, and what weak mortal should assume that she(for this happens to be a mainly feminine affliction) is the standardaccording to which other mortals ought to be raised?
Two of these energetic ladies have been pictured with a bitter vividnessby Wells in Altiora Bailey and Aunt Plessington, the former summing upthe Fabian-expert view, the latter summing up the Superior-philanthropicview. Altiora has "P.B.P."--_pro bono publico_--engraved inside herwedding ring. All the misery of the world she marshals invincibly instatistics. She sees everything as existing in types and classes; shepushes her cause with a hard, scheming, and wholly self-centredeagerness, managing political dinners, indefatigably compilingblue-books, dreaming of a world nailed as tightly and firmly under therule of experts as a carpet is nailed with brass tacks.
On the other hand Aunt Plessington is the incarnation of a "Movement"somewhat vague in purpose but always aggressively beneficial to thehelpless ones of the earth. "Her voice was the true governing-classvoice, a strangulated contralto, abundant and authoritative; it madeeverything she said clear and important, so that if she said it was afine morning it was like leaded print in the _Times_." Her mission isprincipally to interfere with the habits and tastes of theworking-class, making it impossible for them to buy tobacco and beer or"the less hygienic and more palatable forms of bread (which do notsufficiently stimulate the coatings of the stomach)." She is, in short,one of those odious managing people who know nothing of and care nothingfor human nature, who concern themselves wholly with the effects withoutpenetrating to the causes of misery, who see mankind as irrevocablydivided into a governing and a governed class, and whose idea ofgovernment is to make the governed as uncomfortably efficient aspossible and as lacking in free will. She is exactly one of thosearrogant sterile souls, in love with methods rather than men, who havemade the Servile State an imminent and horrid possibility and haveturned so many misinformed human beings (including Tolstoy) againstsocialism altogether.
If Wells dislikes Administrative and Philanthropic socialism becausethey are not sufficiently human, he has an equal aversion to what iscalled orthodox, that is to say, Revolutionary socialism; and in this heincludes all socialism that is fundamentally economic. "I have longsince ceased to trouble about the economics of human society," saysStratton in _The Passionate Friends_, in words we are justified intaking as the opinion of Wells himself. "Ours are not economic butpsychological difficulties."
That statement is full of meaning. It expresses, not a fact but apersonal conviction--the personal conviction with which thepsychological constructive socialism of Wells begins. But before I passon to this I must make one comment that persists in my mind.
Nothing is more remarkable than the unanimity with which during the lastfew years the advanced world has put all its eggs in the basket ofpragmatism, the basket that has been so alluringly garnished byBergson's _Creative Evolution_, In this movement of thought Wells hasinevitably become one of the leaders, and his practical desertion of thesocialist cause is one of the main symptoms of it. The creative energiesof men, where society as a whole is concerned, are, in this phil
osophy,conceived as bursting through the husks and institutions of the world,not consciously destroying them but shedding them incidentally andpassing on. Now as regards sociology there is an obvious fatalism inthat; for the burden of proof lies once more on a personal basis, on apersonal basis qualified by the capacity of the person. It is true thatthis creative and constructive tendency, like the total tendency ofmodern life, is in the direction of socialism, it is true that athousand elements in modern life which could never be engaged in theclass-war are led by it into line with socialism. Yet there capitalismis! Only the black-browed Marxian steadily contemplates the fact thatyear by year the rich compound their riches and the poor their poverty,while those that have no chance of creative outlets plant dynamite.
I do not mean that Wells is "wrong" in abandoning the economic for thepsychological approach,--that is plainly the inevitable course for him.I wish simply to mark a distinction. The gospel of Wells is an entirelypersonal one; it frankly concerns itself with the inner realities of thehuman mind, and in that lies its great importance. But let usdiscriminate. Like every purely personal doctrine it contains, inrelation to the facts and causes of society, a certain quietism. Itwithdraws the mind from corporate action and lays emphasis on corporatethought. But it recognizes no corporate enemy. To be an opponent ofcapitalism as such, is, in this philosophy, as quaint and crude andcrusty as to be an anti-suffragist or a believer in politics (for it hasbecome the fashion to believe with fervor in the franchise and scarcelyto believe at all in what the franchise stands for).
There is then a certain danger in the creative pragmatism of thisparticular time. If it actually does penetrate to the head men of theworld, if it is able to generate what I suppose may be called a "moralequivalent" of duty--and there is almost a probability that it will--thehazard is won. If it does not--and many keen thinkers and men of actionare obdurate--then we shall simply have the _fait accompli_ withcompound interest. What if it should turn out in the end, after the bestbrains of socialism had all withdrawn from the economic programme ofsocialism, that capitalism grows all the greener in the sunlight oftheir tacit consent? There is Congress, there is Parliament, and therethey propose to remain. Suppose they are not converted from the top? Isit altogether wise to stop persecuting them from the bottom?
So much before I pass on. This comment does not qualify the teaching ofWells. It merely supplements it from the economic side, and thesupplement seems to me an important one.
Of a piece with his whole point of view is that he calls the rightsociological method not a scientific but an artistic method: it consistsof the making and comparing of Utopias. This idea he sets forth in hispaper _The So-called Science of Sociology_. "What is called thescientific method," he says, "the method of observation, of theory aboutthese observations, experiments in verification of that theory andconfirmation or modification, really 'comes off' in the sciences inwhich the individuality of the units can be pretty completely ignored."The method that is all-important in the primary physical sciences wherethe individuality of atoms and molecules may conveniently be ignored forthe sake of practical truth, becomes in his view proportionately untrueas the sciences in their gradation approach the human world. "Wecannot," he says in _First and Last Things_, "put humanity into a museumand dry it for examination; our one still living specimen is allhistory, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is nosatisfactory means of dividing it and nothing in the real world withwhich to compare it. We have only the remotest idea of its 'life-cycle'and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its destiny." And in thepaper I have just mentioned he speaks of the Social Idea as a thing"struggling to exist and realize itself in a world of egotisms, animals,and brute matter.... Now I submit it is not only a legitimate form ofapproach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful form ofapproach, to endeavor to disentangle and express one's personal versionof that idea, and to measure realities from the standpoint of thatrealization. I think, in fact, that the creation of Utopias--and theirexhaustive criticism--is the proper and distinctive method ofsociology." This notion of sociology as properly artistic in method anddiagnostic in aim indicates his main divergence from the methods andaims of Comte and Spencer.
And so one turns to his own illustration of this belief, _A ModernUtopia_. It is a beautiful Utopia, beautifully seen and beautifullythought; and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint onefinds in _News from Nowhere_. Morris, of course, carries us into a worldwhere right discipline has long since produced right will, so wholly andinstinctively socialized that men can afford to be as free as anarchistswould have the unsocialized men of our own time, a world such as Goethehad in mind when he said: "There is in man a force, a spring of goodnesswhich counterbalances egoism; and if by a miracle it could for a momentsuddenly be active in all men, the earth would at once be free fromevil." Well, that is the miracle which has in some way just taken placebefore the curtain goes up on most Utopias; and I think that Wells hasnever been more skilful than in keeping this miracle quietly in his bagof tricks and devising meanwhile a plausible transition between us andthat better world. It all happens in a moment and we are there. By anamazing legerdemain of logic he leaps the gap and presents us with aplanet which at every point tallies with our own. It is a planet whichdoes not contain a State but is a State, the flexible result of a freesocial gesture.
_Mankind in the Making_ should be taken as introductory to _A ModernUtopia_. It is the sketch of a method towards attaining such a worldstate. It is a kind of treatise on education based on the assumptionthat "our success or failure with the unending stream of babies is themeasure of our civilization." It opens with a complete repudiation of"scientific" breeding, as a scheme which ignores the uniqueness ofindividual cases and the heterogeneous nature of human ideals. "We are,"says Wells, "not a bit clear what points to breed for, and what pointsto breed out;" while the interplay of strong and varied personalities wedesire is contradictory to any uniform notions of beauty, capacity, andsanity, which thus cannot be bred for, so to speak, in the abstract. Butin _A Modern Utopia_ he outlines certain conditions limiting parentage,holding it necessary that in order to be a parent a man must be above acertain minimum of capacity and income, failing which he is indebted tothe State for the keep of his children. Motherhood is endowed andbecomes in this way a normal and remunerative career, which renders themother capable of giving her time to the care and education of herchildren, as millions are not in a wage-earning civilization, and makesboth her and her children independent of the ups and downs of herhusband. His very detailed suggestions about the education of youngchildren (illustrated also in _The Food of the Gods_) are at once areminiscence of Rabelais and an anticipation of Madame Montessori. Heinsists upon uniform pronunciation (a very important matter in England,where diversity of language is one of the bulwarks of a rigidclass-system), the universality and constant revision of text-books, thesystematic reorganization of public library and bookselling methods,with a view to making the race think as a whole. He urges the necessityof rescuing literature from the accidents of the book-market by endowingcritical reviews, chairs for the discussion of contemporary thought, andqualified thinkers and writers regardless of their special bias orprinciples. To strike a mean between the British abuse of government byhereditary privilege and the American abuse of government by electoralmachines he ingeniously proposes the election of officials by the jurymethod, twenty or thirty men being set aside by lot to determine theproper holders of office. And he is convinced of the importance in ademocracy of abundant honors, privileges, even titles, and abundantopportunities for fruitful leisure.
I have already spoken of his belief that the right sociological methodis the creation and comparison of individual Utopias. Thus his ownfree-hand sketch of a better world is, in fact, a criticism of allprevious works of the kind. As distinguished from them the modernUtopia, he says, has to present not a finally perfect stage but ahopefully ascending one; it has to present men not as uniform types butas conflicting indi
vidualities with a common bond; and moreover it hasto occupy, not some remote island or province "over the range" but awhole planet. The Utopia of Wells is a world which differs from thepresent world in one fundamental respect only--it has one initialadvantage: that every individual in it has been _started right_, in thedegree in which the collective knowledge of the world has rendered thatpossible.
But there is no need for me to say anything more about these books. Theyare the free and suggestive motions of a mind inexhaustibly fertile andgiven to many devices. Anyone who has read Wells at all is aware of hisingenuity, his equal capacity for large schemes and minute details, histruly Japanese belief in radical changes, once they are seen to benecessary and possible. And indeed the details of social arrangementfollow naturally and profusely enough, once you get the frame of mindthat wishes them. Wells in his Utopia presupposes the frame of mind. Inshort, he puts education first; he believes that the essential problemsof the present are not economic but psychological.
And here where the constructive theory of Wells begins, let me quote apassage from _The New Machiavelli_ that gives the gist of it:
The line of human improvements and the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that it can develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And here my initial difficulty as against crude democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high education and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and scope and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has become my general conception in politics, the conception of the constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted, aristocratic culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of low minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and redirected by literature and art.
This permeation of the head men of the world, this creation of a naturalcollective-minded aristocracy appears now to be the permanent hope ofWells. It is the stuff of all his novels, it is the centre of hisethical system; and his _Utopia_ is made possible by the existence in itof just such a flexible leading caste--the so-called Samurai. Butbefore coming to the inner implications of this, to the individual andpersonal realities and difficulties of this, I must follow thedevelopment of the idea in Wells himself. At various times, in variousworks, he has presented it from a dozen different angles: as somethingthat is certain to come, as something he greatly desires to come, assomething that will not come at all except through prodigious effort, assomething that will come through a general catastrophe, as somethingthat will come through isolated individual endeavor, and the like. Thatis to say he has presented his idea through all the various literarymediums of exposition, fable, prophecy, psychological analysis, andethical appeal.
It appears in a crude form in his first avowedly sociological work,_Anticipations_. He there attempts to show that the chaos of society isof itself beginning to generate a constructive class, into whose handsit must ultimately fall. The advance of mechanism, he predicts, willproduce four clearly defined classes: an immense shareholding class withall the potentialities of great property and a complete lack of functionwith regard to that property; a non-producing class of middle-mendependent on these, and composed of agents, managers, lawyers, clerks,brokers, speculators, typists, and organizers; the expropriated class ofpropertyless and functionless poor, whose present livelihood isdependent on the fact that machinery is not yet so cheap as their labor.And amid this generally disorganized mass a fourth element will defineitself. This in rudiment is the element of mechanics and engineers,whose work makes it necessary for them to understand the machines theyare making and to be continually on the lookout for new methods. Thesemen, he holds, will inevitably develop a common character based on aself-wrought scientific education and view of life. About them as anucleus all the other skilled and constructive minds--doctors, teachers,investigators, writers, and the like--will tend to group themselves; andas the other classes in their very nature will tend to socialdisintegration, these will inevitably grow more and more conscious of apurpose, a reason, a function in common, and will disentangle themselvesfrom the aimless and functionless masses about them. Democracy, as weknow it, will meanwhile pass away. For democratic government unavoidablyreduces itself to government by party machines and party machines dependfor their existence on alarms, quarrelsome patriotisms, andinternational exasperations whose almost inevitable outcome is war.
Whether war follows or not, the power of society is bound to fall intothe hands of the scientifically trained, constructive middle class,because this class is the only indispensable element in it. Without warthis must occur just as soon as the spending and purchasing power of theshareholding class becomes dependent for its existence on the classwhich alone can save society from destruction. With war it will occurwith even greater rapidity: for in the warfare of the future that nationis bound to win which has most effectively realized socialist ideals, inwhich the government can command, with least interference from privatecontrol, its roads, its food, its clothing, its material, its resources,which has most efficiently organized itself as a whole; and the classthat modern warfare will bring to the front is the class that knows howto handle machinery and how to direct it. But just as this class will bethe most efficient in war, so will it be the most careful to preventwar: it will in fact confirm the ultimate tendency toward a World Stateat peace with itself, through the agency, not of any of the governmentsthat we know to-day but of an informal cooperative organization which isaltogether outside the governmental systems of society, and which may intime assimilate the greater part of the population of the world.
Such is the argument of this book, and except for the inevitability ofit--the belief that all this _must_ come to pass--Wells has not sinceabandoned it in any essential way. The new aristocracy that figuresthere, the advance-guard of a better civilization, is precisely theethical ideal which is embodied in the chief characters of his novels.Thus too the Samurai of _A Modern Utopia_ are figured as having arisenat first informally as the constructive minds disentangling themselvesfrom the social chaos. Gradually becoming aware through research,discussion and cooperation of a common purpose, they have at lastassumed a militant form and supplanted the political organizations ofthe world.
The general intention of all this finds utterance in the most poetic ofall the fables of Wells, _The Food of the Gods_. The Food itself,invented by two undistinguished-looking scientists, becomes current inthe world through the very haphazardness of a society which will notcontrol discoveries detrimental to it and which consequently has nomeans of coping with a discovery capable of superseding it."Heracleophorbia" has thus the same initial advantage as Tono-Bungay orany other shabby patent medicine. It has an additional advantage; forwhile patent medicines have the sanction of private enterprise and arecontrolled by secret patents for the gain of their inventors, the Foodof the Gods, like every discovery of honorable scientists, is givenfreely to the world. Thus the Food and the gigantic race of supermen whospring from it and bring
with them a nobler order of things arethemselves generated by the very chaos they promise to supplant. Just inproportion as the inventors are frank and open men, having no secretgainful purpose, the Food spreads far and wide. It is stolen, spilled,scattered; and wherever it falls every living thing grows gigantic.Immense wasps drone like motor-cars over the meadows, chickens grow aslarge as emus, and here and there a baby fed upon it and unablethereafter to accept any less robust diet grows gradually to Rabelaisianproportions. Caddles, a type of all the growing giants, comes to hisforty-foot maturity in a remote village where, as the mellow vicarobserves, "Things change, but Humanity--_aere perennius_." There he istaught by the little folk to submit himself to all his governors,teachers, spiritual pastors and masters and to order himself lowly andreverently to all his betters. They put him to work in the chalk-pits,where he learns to manage a whole quarry single-handed and makes ofhimself a rudimentary engineer, and then he breaks loose and tramps toLondon. He finds himself in the crowded New Kent Road, and they tell himhe is obstructing the traffic: "But where is it going?" he says; "wheredoes it come from? What does it mean?" Around him play the electricsigns advertising Yanker's Yellow Pills and Tupper's Tonic Wine forVigor, conveying to his troubled mind the significance of a world ofchaos and accident, perverted instinct, and slavery to base suggestion.
Is it necessary to say that society becomes alarmed at last? Is itnecessary to add that Wells opens fire upon it with his whole battery ofsatire? Plainly men and giants cannot live in the same world; the littlemen find their little ways, their sacred customs of order, home, andreligion threatened by a strange new thing. The Children of the Foodmeanwhile have grown beyond the conventions and proportions of commonlife; they have experienced a kind of humanity to which all men canattain and from which there can be no retrogression to the lesserscheme. In the end, having found one another, they assemble in theirembankment, the world against them. They sit amid their vast machinery,Titanic shapes in the darkness broken by searchlights and the flames oftheir forges. An ambassador from the old order brings them the termsupon which they may go free. They must separate themselves from theworld and give up the Food. They refuse:
"Suppose we give up this thing that stirs within us," says the GiantLeaguer.... "What then? Will this little world of theirs be as it wasbefore? They may fight against greatness in us who are the children ofmen, but can they conquer?... For greatness is abroad, and not only inus, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in thenature of all things, it is part of time and space. To grow and still togrow, from first to last, that is Being, that is the law of life."
The World of H.G. Wells Page 4