Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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to be neither politician nor prophet and had to remain more esoteric than
enthusiastic.
In descending from principle and considering how governments might
be justified in intervening to promote morality in actual modern European
communities, Sidgwick returns to the intimate connection between the
church and the dualism, arguing that:
For ordinary members of such communities, the connection of any individual’s
interest with his duty is established by the traditional Christian teaching as to
the moral government of the world, and the survival of the individual after his
corporeal death. Accordingly, this traditional teaching – though it by no means
relies solely on appeals to self-interest – still always includes in its store of ar-
guments appeals of this kind, having irresistible cogency for all hearers who
believe the fundamental Christian doctrines. So far as the rules of duty thus
taught are those commonly accepted by thoughtful persons, the value of the aid
given to the work of government by this supply of extra-mundane motives to
the performance of social duty can hardly be doubted. But the expediency of
governmental action to secure this aid is importantly affected by the fact that
the teachers who give it are actually organised in independent associations called
churches, whose lines of division differ from – and to an important extent cut
across – the lines of division of political societies; and which for the most part
would resist strongly any attempt to bring them directly and completely un-
der the control of the secular government. The practical question therefore is,
whether government should leave these churches unfettered – treating them like
any other voluntary associations based on free contract – or should endeavour to
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obtain a partial control over them in return for endowments or other advantages.
(EP –)
But this, Sidgwick explains, is bound to be a very difficult question,
since “so far as the priest or religious teacher seeks not merely to pro-
vide a harmonious and satisfying expression for religious emotion, but
also to regulate the behaviour of man to his fellows in domestic and civil
relations, – using as motives the hope of reward and fear of punishment
from an invisible source, – his function obviously tends to become quasi-
governmental.” And when Sidgwick returns to the topic, in his chapter
on “The State and Voluntary Associations,” he considers it from the per-
spective of “how the State should proceed in order that the advantages
derivable from them [voluntary religious associations] may be the greatest
possible, and the dangers that they involve may be avoided or reduced.”
Insisting that the Christian churches “meet a social need of fundamen-
tal importance,” and that given their “systematic teaching of morality,”
the state gains from their being vigorous and effective, he nonetheless
concludes that they “are likely to fulfil their function better if kept inde-
pendent of the State. For, if the clergy acquire the character of officials ap-
pointed and paid by the State, they become exposed in some degree to the
objections . . . against a governmental organisation for teaching morality:
and are therefore likely to be less effective in rendering the service for
which the State appoints and pays them.” (EP )
Naturally, Sidgwick takes a firm stand for religious freedom.
Direct prohibition of any religious teaching not clearly inciting to illegal conduct, or otherwise immoral in its tendency, is invidious and objectionable, as interfering
with the free communication of beliefs on which the development of human
thought depends; and it is likely to be ineffective or worse in the most dangerous
cases, from the ease with which opinions and sentiments hostile to government may
be secretly propagated among persons united by a community of religious feeling,
and the increased violence that they are likely to assume from the resentment
caused by repression.
Better than any actual repression of religious beliefs or practices seri-
ously inimical to the government is the effort “to secure a certain control
over religious teaching, by the grant of privileges the withdrawal of which
would only reduce the Church to the level of other voluntary associations.”
Such favoritism, “without anything like establishment or endowment,”
could avoid conflict, though there might also be various minor degrees
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of endowment, such as tax breaks and the provision of religious facilities,
and it is important for the state to avoid “the awkward dilemma of either
endeavouring to make one set of religious opinions prevail over others held
by equally educated persons, or of endeavouring to moralise the commu-
nity by imparting a number of mutually inconsistent beliefs.” (EP )
And there are further measures, such that, for example, “Government may
refuse to admit any religious society to the position of a corporation capable
of holding and administering property, unless its organisation fulfils cer-
tain conditions, framed with the view of preventing its ‘quasi-government’
from being oppressive to individual members of the association or dan-
gerous to the State” (EP ).
Thus, one sees how Sidgwick’s concern about hypocrisy in high places
shifts effortlessly between state and church, political leadership and reli-
gious leadership. What one does not see, however, is anything like a frank
confrontation with the possibility that the impossibility of achieving a
scientific morality and the consensus of experts might lead to the impos-
sibility of finding teachers with the requisite sincerity and enthusiasm – a
bunch of Sidgwicks, arguably the thing that most worried him. Nor, obvi-
ously, does one find in Sidgwick’s political work that “science of society”
that could actually explain how the more optimistic future that he envi-
sions, with high-minded, far-seeing leadership gradually opening the way
for ethical socialism and semisocialism in economics, might come to pass.
The normative analysis – the enjoining of civilized, utilitarian minds to
resist through self-sacrifice the demoralizing effects of the modern world –
is always primary.
Manifestly, for all the usual dry evasion, a very big part of Sidgwick’s
answer is: education, understood in the broad sense of fostering an edu-
cating society, fostering Millian culture if not esoteric doubt. Education
is what is supposed to produce an aristocracy worthy of the name, and an
electorate willing to recognize the superior judgment of representatives<
br />
and grant them the power to govern, rather than serve as mere delegates
following the popular mandate. In an early and singularly revealing letter
to Oscar Browning, in part quoted earlier, Sidgwick had made his ultimate
commitment pretty evident:
[O]f course people who make the lucky hits are uneducated generally, but that is
just the point; if you could get all classes properly educated in the highest sense
of the term, a man who came into a fortune by ‘striking ile’ would not waste
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it: and if he did not become a patron of Art, he might bring up his children to
be so. . . . What I want to do is to put an end to the existing and threatening strife between Labour and Capital by any possible means. (M –)
Again, the concern is to get “all classes properly educated” – not simply
the “lower” orders, but also the “upper” ones – and this in the “highest
sense of the term,” while also gradually reducing the economic distance
between the two. That any such effort would include the kind of mingling
of minds effected in some of the various discussion societies and other
educational efforts in which Sidgwick had participated was, alas, perhaps
too much taken for granted by him, so that he did not adequately theorize
all of the educational resources that he deployed or admired. Emphatic
enough on the kinds of corruption involved in the growth of the party
system and the forms of political debate it fostered, he did not, in the
Elements, succeed in completely articulating the very thing that he had
himself done so much to advance in practice, as a vehicle for elevating the
quality of public debate and spreading culture – the very thing that set
his reformism apart from ideological indoctrination. Even freedom of the
press receives a fairly perfunctory treatment:
We have seen that the control over government given to the governed by periodical
elections is likely to be comparatively ineffective and ill-directed, unless the danger of blindness or apathy on the part of the governed be met by full and free criticism
of current legislation and administration. At the same time, such criticism is likely to be often very distasteful to the governmental organs criticised, even when it
is highly useful: hence there is a prima facie reason for including in any rigid constitution rules protecting the citizen’s right ‘to speak the thing he will’ from
undue governmental interference. But with a view to the maintenance of order, it
seems important that this protection should only be given to criticism that () is
bona fide intended to recommend only legal methods for obtaining the reform of what is criticised, and () would not be understood as an incitement to illegality
by a person of ordinary intelligence. . . . Hence any constitutional rule restraining the legislature from ‘abridging freedom of speech or of the press’ will require to be qualified by a tolerably comprehensive permission to prohibit seditious utterances.
(EP )
Writing in the aftermath of the French Commune and the social-
ist agitation in England that had resulted in Bloody Sunday – the po-
lice attack on a peaceful procession of radicals, members of the Irish
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National League, and socialists in Trafalgar Square on November ,
– Sidgwick’s balancing of stability against liberty might sound rather
worse than “utilitarianism grown tame and sleek.” And yet of H. M.
Hyndman, the forceful socialist leader and collaborator with William
Morris, Sidgwick could write to Foxwell: “I am interested in what you say
of Hyndman. He is a man I am disposed to like – though he does call me
an eclectic bourgeois.” (CWC) Moreover, he continued to be on friendly
terms with William Morris, whose socialist poems he found “touching.”
Thus, the puzzles about Sidgwick’s politics run deep. Previous narra-
tives have tried to fit him into both the conservative reaction to Gladstone
and the growth at century’s end of a progressivist “via media” determined
to get beyond the dead ends of earlier religious, philosophical, and political
disputes. For some, he was merely an old Millian elitist, an “aristocratic
liberal” and “public moralist” unwittingly bolstering the application of
Enlightenment thinking to the mission of British imperialism. For others,
he was a force for changing times, on the road to pragmatism.
What is missing from most such accounts is a willingness to take
Sidgwick on his own (philosophically sophisticated) terms, an appreci-
ation of his efforts to synthesize or reconcile the wide range of views
that moved him. Even Symonds’s Whitmania is at least somewhat evi-
dent in Sidgwick’s celebration of America and the need for a culture of
harmonization, beyond party and class strife. He was impressed enough
with the intelligence of the artisans, and he certainly recognized the need
for a new cultural formation, with an enthusiasm for devotion and self-
sacrifice, for true comradeship and the growth of sympathetic under-
standing, stimulated by all the resources of literature and culture in the
larger sense. The vision of a cosmic unity, of the overcoming of strife
and the achievement of a harmony of duty and interest – this always
gripped him, whether coming from Maurice, or Myers, or Symonds. Un-
der the circumstances, he was not prepared to reject an enthusiastic teacher
with poetic talent. And after all, Whitman himself had some distaste for
the realities of political institutions. What Noel, Myers, and Symonds
found in him was not Rousseauian democracy but something much more
Platonic:
I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for
facts, even the business materialism of the current age, our States. But woe to
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the age or land in which these things, movements, stopping at themselves, do not
tend to ideas. As fuel to flame, and flame to the heavens, so must wealth, science,
materialism – even this democracy of which we make so much – unerringly feed
the highest mind, the soul.
To hate hypocrisy and endless strife was the common currency; to cre-
ate a new, enthusiastic cultural vision of the unity of humanity – what
precisely was Sidgwick to find objectionable in this? Even Greek love,
if duly refined and conducing to intellectual growth, was a force in this
direction, not that it was always to be openly proclaimed. Internal sanc-
/>
tions rather than revolution, personal growth rather than industrial war,
comradeship rather than class conflict – all of this spoke to Sidgwick.
For him,
the deepest problems presented by war, and the deepest principles to be applied
in dealing with them, are applicable also to the milder conflicts and collisions
that arise within the limits of an orderly and peaceful community, and especially
to those struggles for wealth and power carried on by classes and parties within
a state. Indeed, these latter – though conducted by the milder methods of de-
bate and vote – often resemble wars very strongly in the states of thought and
feeling that they arouse, and also in some of the difficulties that they suggest.
(PE )
“External” methods for resolving such conflicts – for example, arbi-
tration – can go only so far, and cannot be relied upon “for a complete
and final removal of the evils of strife.” For this, “spiritual” methods
are needed, and, recognizing the risk of ineffective rhetoric on behalf of
justice,
we may none the less endeavour to develop the elements from which the moral
habit of justice springs – on the one hand, sympathy, and the readiness to imagine
oneself in another’s place and look at things from his point of view; and on the
other hand, the intelligent apprehension of common interests. In this way we may
hope to produce a disposition to compromise, adequate for practical needs, even
when the adjustment thus attained can only be rough, and far removed from what
either party regards as ideally equitable. (PE )
This is not political deal-making, but a practical extension of the sympa-
thetic understanding and harmonization that Sidgwick so prized. But was
it really possible to avoid hypocrisy, after ?
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V. Spiritual Expansion
There may be Elements of English Politics, or of American, or of French or
Prussian; but the elements of general politics, if cast into general considerations,
must either be quite colorless or quite misleading.
Woodrow Wilson, review of the Elements of Politics