Revolutionaries, and Metaphysics

I NOW turn to consider the contribution of a temper and a doctrine, very different both from the saint's and from the sceptic's.

The genuine revolutionary lives wholly for the revolution, as the genuine saint lives wholly for his God. Like the saint, the sincere revolutionary is inspired by generous feeling for his fellow men. He is possessed, obsessed, by the spirit of comradeship, in fact by what Christians claim to be the truly Christian spirit, the spirit of active love. To regard the revolutionary as possessed by hate, as many affect to do, is to miss the truth completely. Can there ever have been a more contemptible spectacle in the sordid history of human affairs than the concerted effort of a wealthy and parasitic class to discredit the revolutionaries by misrepresenting their righteous indignation as mere hate and envy? By their fruits ye shall know them. The fruits of the revolutionary are life-long courageous efforts to defend the oppressed.

I have mainly in mind the sincere kind of Marxian revolutionary, because he is the effective champion of revolution in our day. But much that I shall say about the behaviour, as distinct from the theories, of revolutionaries applies to any kind of genuine revolutionary, whether Marxian or Anarchist or what not. Even among professed advocates of Fascism there are almost certainly many whom I should regard as genuine though terribly misguided revolutionaries. Much that I shall say is true of them also.

The word genuine, of course, is necessary. The sham revolutionary is often a very plausible imitation. It is worth noting that there are two kinds of sham revolutionaries. First, there are some, certainly, in whom the ruling motive is no longer (if it ever was) love or comradeship but simply envy and hate. These glory in hate, and thereby do much harm to the cause. In this they are similar to some sham saints who are more concerned for the damnation of sinners than for the salvation of the elect. Hate can be a disinterested passion, in the sense that a man can sacrifice everything, even his life, for sheer hate. It follows that hate can also be a prodigious source of energy. Some sincere revolutionaries therefore deliberately cultivate it in themselves and others. I believe that this is a short-sighted policy, for in the long run hate poisons the spirit of the individual and of the revolution.

The other kind of sham revolutionary is much the commoner kind. These are the self-seekers, conscious or unconscious, who masquerade as revolutionaries, hoping to secure private advancement or prestige by an appearance of revolutionary zeal. The sham revolutionary of this commoner kind tries to give the impression that he is living wholly for the revolution while he is in fact assiduously avoiding all serious risks. Most of these people do, no doubt, want a revolution, or at least they think they do; but they do not want it whole-heartedly. Some do not really want it at all. They merely want to make profit out of the idea of it, either by talking impressively about it, or by gaining power and prestige through the control of some revolutionary organization, or by actually drawing pay from revolutionary funds. In the sham revolutionary of this type, self-interest and self-respect feed upon the possibility of an ever-unfulfilled revolution. Naturally he is reluctant to set in motion any great change which might destroy his comfortable position. In fact he is a conservative in revolutionary clothing. The genuine revolutionary not only desires the revolution more than anything else; conscious that he would sacrifice himself for it, he is ready to sacrifice others if they stand in the way. The sham revolutionary, on the other hand, though he will sacrifice others, will not when it comes to the point sacrifice himself. Both the genuine revolutionary and the genuine saint habitually and heroically transcend the urge of self-regard; their shams do not.

But between the genuine saint and the genuine revolutionary there is a great gulf, which appears! not only in their professions but in their behaviour. The saint is chiefly concerned with individuals and their personal relations with one another. The revolutionary is interested in groups and their mutual repercussions.

This statement may perhaps seem untrue. The saint himself, of course, is concerned not only with the individual but with masses of individuals. And the revolutionary, the genuine revolutionary, is in a sense concerned primarily not with abstract groups or classes but with the well-being of the individuals that compose them. His controlling motive is a passionate will to relieve hosts of individuals from tyranny and frustration. It is because he so vividly realizes this tyranny, and the day-by-day frustration of John Smith and Joan Brown, that he devotes himself to revolution.

All the same, it is true and important that, while the saint's main interest is in individuals, the revolutionary's is in groups. For the texture of the saint's behaviour is made up largely of acts directed toward the strengthening of individuality in particular individuals, while the revolutionary's behaviour is mainly composed of acts directed toward strengthening group-consciousness in masses of individuals, or toward controlling in one manner or another the thought and action of groups. In fact the saint is more interested in, individuality and the revolutionary in sociality.

This preponderant interest in sociality sometimes leads revolutionaries to disparage individuality and hypostatize society. They realize vividly that the individual mind is an expression of its social environment. And in spite of their fundamental concern for the individual's fulfilment they tend to subordinate him to the large pattern of social relationships. And though their source of inspiration is the will to free the oppressed individual, they seek meanwhile to discipline him for the revolution. The Party members regard themselves as consecrated to the task of spreading a gospel not only of service but of self-abnegation, and moreover of obedience to revolutionary authority. They insist that the individual cannot fulfil himself save as an instrument of society, or a channel for social forces. Idiosyncrasy and eccentricity they tend to condemn. Its expression in culture they are apt to regard as mere "escapism."

In times of desperate social crisis this attitude may be justified. But the fact that revolutionaries incline emotionally in this direction makes it likely that they will too readily conform to revolutionary orthodoxy, and too readily insist on conformity in others.

The genuine saint is not in danger of succumbing to herd-mindedness, or of imposing herd-mindedness on others. He is too self-conscious either to desire to bay with the pack or to seek to be the mouthpiece and leader of the pack. The saint, of course, regards community as the supreme human value; but the community that he applauds is essentially a community of self-aware and other-aware individuals. His particular danger, avoided, of course, by the best of his kind, is not herd-mindedness but a kind of individualism, not selfish individualism, but the individualism which inclines to over-estimate the worth of private moral intuitions. With the revolutionary the reverse is the case. He is impressed by social forces and mass movements of opinion. He distrusts private intuitions and all eccentricity. He has an admirably clear consciousness of the form of existing society, and of its rottenness compared with the society that he desires; but in comparison with the saint he seems to be only superficially self-conscious, and therefore only superficially other-conscious. He may, of course, be intensely, but is not penetratingly conscious of himself; and consequently he cannot be penetratingly conscious of others.

This statement may seem unjustified. The revolutionary, I may be told, is more, not less, penetratingly self-conscious than the saint; since he is more clearly aware of the way in which motives are determined by unconscious influences, such as the pressure of the economic environment. The saint, according to the revolutionary, is the supreme self-deceiver.

This view is surely mistaken. The revolutionary has, of course, a certain kind of knowledge of himself. He has the normal acquaintance with himself as needing food, success, comradeship, and so on. But beyond this his knowledge of himself is a scientific, abstract, theoretical, indirect kind of knowledge. It is not derived from meticulous self-scrutiny, as the saint's is, but from scientific and sociological theories.

In saying this I do not intend to condemn scientific knowledge. Physiology, psychology, anthropology, sociology have an important part to play in clarifying self-knowledge. But they are only aids. Self-knowledge must be founded on minute observation of one's actual experience and motives.

Nor do I intend to condemn the revolutionary. It is no more his function to be deeply conscious of individuality than it is the function of the saint to be an effective politician. Each of them, of course, if he is to be true to his own calling, must to some extent share in the others' special aptitude. The saint must think socially. The revolutionary, on his side, must at least have intense consciousness of certain important but simple aspects of individuality which in the less fortunate classes are grossly frustrated.

Moreover there is, of course, an important identity in the emotional experience of the saint and the revolutionary. Both feel warmly toward the average individual. Not princes, politicians, intellectuals, great ecclesiastics, or great revolutionary leaders do they cherish, but Everyman.

This democratic feeling may be combined, in both saints and revolutionaries, with an aristocratic sense that some individuals are much more developed, more awakened, than others, and more valuable to society. Some, indeed, rise much further than others beyond the merely animal mentality. They are capable of much more precise, subtle and comprehensive awareness, and of much more integrated conduct. But this recognition of the different natural ranks of men is always subordinate. It is a sense of the differences of attainment of the members of one family. Always there is a tacit assumption that even the weakest of the brethren or of the comrades is potentially equal to the leader, the eldest brother.

In the pure aristocrat, on the other hand, whether the social or the intellectual aristocrat, the sense of difference is such that average individuals are regarded as an inferior species. Saints and revolutionaries both reject this cult of the superior person, and find in the experience of common men and women, united in practical comradeship, the great source of inspiration and enlightenment. In their view the life of aristocrats, social or intellectual, is artificial and false. Divorced from the community life of the masses, it develops an exaggerated cult of refinement and of the separate individual. For my part, though I see little value in a social aristocracy, I am convinced that an intellectual, or rather cultural, aristocracy is necessary for the healthy life of a society; but its members must regard themselves as specialists in a particular form of social service, not as superior persons.

Though saints and revolutionaries agree in rejecting the aristocratic view, beyond this point their convictions diverge. The saint must specialize in consciousness of individuality-in-community, and the technique of raising individuality to a higher calibre in himself and others. The revolutionary's source of inspiration and strength is his simpler but no less passionately generous awareness of the frustration of individuality in the masses. This awareness he has to use as a source of energy for a life devoted to changing the social order.

There may be, there probably are, times in the history of a community when nothing whatever should be allowed to stand in the way of revolution. There may be other times when nothing is more important than a direct improving of personal relationship. To-day the need for revolution and the need for better personal relationship are complementary, and must be pursued together. To-day we cannot be saved by saints alone, nor by revolutionaries alone. Saints and revolutionaries must co-operate. Also they must acquire something of one another's nature. Saints must to some extent become revolutionaries, and revolutionaries saints.

When I was considering saints, I said that the true saint's absolute moral principle was respect for individuality and right personal relationship. Kindliness and trustworthiness are for him the supreme virtues. It would be untrue to say that the saint will never, and the revolutionary will sometimes, desert this principle. No doubt many true saints may sometimes in emergency use or countenance violence. No doubt also they may sometimes deceive, namely when they see no other way of preventing greater evil. But the saint, even if his devotion to non-violence and to truthfulness is not absolute, uses violence and deceit only in the most desperate emergency, and with an agony of horror and shame; whereas the revolutionary can use them with equanimity. If it seems to him that violence or deceit is necessary for the advancement of the cause, he will use it without hesitation, sometimes even with relish.

Both revolutionary and saint can be fired with righteous indignation. But whereas the revolutionary hates the enemies of the revolution, and may even glory in doing so, the saint strives never to hate human beings, and regards hate as the very spirit of evil. The saint's danger is that he may allow great harm to be done to one set of individuals because of his overwhelming revulsion from using violence or deceit against another set. The revolutionary's danger is that through lack of this extreme repugnance he may sometimes practise or applaud violence or deceit in order to gain immediate advantage for the cause, when as a matter of fact this advantage is outweighed by a greater hurt in the future, namely damage to the tradition of kindliness and reasonableness.

So far as mere private interest is concerned the true revolutionary, of course, will never use violence or deceit, for he knows very well that these practices are socially harmful. But in the view of the typical sincere revolutionary an occasional act of violence or of deceit is abundantly justified if it is needed for helping the cause in a tight place. Information damaging to the cause must be suppressed. False information favourable to the cause may be propagated. Traitors must be shot. And of course the revolution itself may have to be achieved by fighting in the streets. Even torture, presumably, might in some circumstances seem to the revolutionary a necessary and therefore permissible means of serving the revolution. For, after all, many who can snap their fingers at death are cowed by torture.

Now even the condemnation of torture, I suggest, should be qualified. There may, for all I know, be circumstances in which a man ought to be subjected to some degree of physical or mental pain "for his soul's good", or to save others from great disaster. I find it exceedingly difficult to imagine any such circumstances, but I recognize the abstract possibility that they may occur. The charge, however, against some revolutionaries is not that they refrain from an absolute condemnation of torture, but that sometimes they too readily condone brutality when it is committed for the revolution. The only adequate reply to Fascist ruthlessness, we are sometimes told, is ruthlessness for the revolution. This attitude suggests a dangerous coarseness of feeling. And, indeed, that the consciousness of some revolutionaries is in some important respects obtuse is evident from their startling failure to comprehend the pacifist's position.

In the matter of intellectual honesty also some revolutionaries are very unperceptive. The trouble is not merely that while insisting on free speech for revolutionaries they demand restrictions upon Fascist agitators. It is at least arguable that in times of grave crisis those who advocate the overthrow of the State and vilify the community's most sacred values should be restrained. But it is disturbing that some revolutionaries seem as ready as their opponents to suppress or distort the truth for the sake of some quite trivial gain for the cause.

The revolutionary, in fact, since he is less self-conscious than the saint, is less vividly aware of what the saint would call the "spiritual" damage done by the use of violence and deceit. He does not so clearly realize that these are very dangerous drugs, perhaps necessary at times, but always seriously poisonous, and moreover habit-forming. Their harmfulness, the saint believes, is two-fold. In the man on whom they are used they produce distrust and hate. In the user they breed not only an addiction but guilty suspicion and a protective shell of callousness. Further, rather perversely, they produce hate against the maltreated individual.

The controlling emotional inclination of the saint is toward that aspect of human life which in our day is easily ridiculed with the label "spiritual uplift". That of the revolutionary is in the main toward "de-bunking". Naturally the one thing that the revolutionary does not want to de-bunk is revolution and the social ideal which he hopes to attain by revolution. These are for him just as sacred as righteousness for the saint. But the general texture of his behaviour is one of indefatigable de-bunking. He is out to expose the pretensions of the employers, of the politicians, including right-wing Labour politicians, of the churches, of Liberal Idealism, of capitalist democracy, of philosophy, of intellectual detachment, of "art for art's sake", of bourgeois culture in general.

The psychological roots of this passion for de-bunking are probably very complex. But whatever its causes in individual experience, the common source of iconoclasm in all revolutionaries is the sense of the prodigious injustice of contemporary human society, and of the discrepancy between the much advertized ideals and the shady achievements of our time. The Churches promised us eternal life if we would practise Christian love. They themselves did not practise as they preached. The Liberal idealists promised us the gradual evolution of a better society if only we would give capitalist individualism a fair chance. Injustice increases. Prosperity wanes, and security too.

The craving to de-bunk is associated with the scientific mentality. The revolutionary is well disposed toward science, for this reason. But his temperament is very different from the completely sceptical disillusionment which triumphed after the war of 1914-1918. The genuine revolutionary's ruling passion is essentially a moral passion. Certain conditions of human affairs are in his view wrong. They ought not to be. We ought to get together to put them right. Though theoretically Marxists reject all universal ethical principles, in practice they exhort us to sacrifice ourselves in a cause which is at bottom the cause of justice and righteousness.

Without attempting to summarize the Marxian philosophy, I shall now very briefly discuss certain parts of it which seem to me relevant to the attempt to create a synthesis out of the temper of the saints, the sceptics and the revolutionaries.

From observation of the actual course of history the Marxist infers that the evolution of institutions and ideas is an expression of the impact of the environment on the economic motives of men; that is, on their need for security, food, comfort. These economic motives are not purely individualistic, since a man is concerned largely with the needs of his family. And besides economic needs, men have other motives. But according to the Marxian theory these other motives are much less powerful than the economic motives. Also they are so varied and individual that in relation to large social changes they cancel out and may be neglected.

In saying that history is "determined" in this way Marxists do not deny that it depends on spontaneous human choices. But human choices turn out to be in practice and in the long run very largely predictable. Men do in practice choose in such manners as to justify the theory of economic determinism. Whether they could in any sense behave otherwise is debatable, but in fact they do on the whole behave in this manner. Economic determinism is a true inductive law of the behaviour of masses of men. Being what they are, and wanting what in the main they do want, they cannot but behave in this manner.

The Marxist declares also that even those acts which are not simply expressions of economic motives are none the less very largely determined by economic influences. The desire for fame or power, for instance, must satisfy itself by taking economic factors into account. The economic structure of society determines the direction which the power-lover will pursue.

The Marxist does not deny that personal idiosyncrasies take effect on the course of events. He allows, too, that outstanding individuals may play an important part in history. But he claims that their power is merely to retard or side-track or advance the inevitable effect of massed economic motives. Outstanding individuals, he says, are most powerful when they are the conscious instruments of social evolution, when they see the direction of social growth, and use their abilities to further it.

Not only institutions but also ideas and valuations must be understood in terms of economic forces. The culture of a society is said to be due to the impact of economic, and particularly technological, conditions on successive generations of individuals. The form of men's minds, or more correctly the form of their mental behaviour, is said to be determined by their economic environment. Thus the culture of ancient Greece is to be understood as an expression of the economic and technological conditions which produced it. These conditions stimulated and set a limit to the possible development of Greek culture in the minds of a property-owning and leisured class. Later on, chivalry was an expression of medieval technological development as it effected an owner-class whose power was military and its social structure hierarchical. Puritanism was a system of ideas and values generated in and appropriate to a rising bourgeois class whose power was based on economic individualism. Modern scientific culture could not have appeared till technological development had reached a certain level of complexity and power. Modern science was beyond the reach of feudalism, but within the reach of early industrialism. And now science has increased a thousand-fold man's technological power, which in turn has enabled science to advance beyond all expectation by means of immensely complicated and costly research and world-wide co-ordination. But to-day, says the Marxist, science is outrageously hobbled by the fact that research is directed mainly for private commercial profit. It should be single-mindedly used for the benefit of the community.

Since the dominant class of a society has far greater influence than any other class, a culture is to be understood mainly in terms of the economic conditions of the dominant class. Sometimes however the ideas and values of a subject-class may, through special circumstances, play an important part. For instance, during the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the birth of feudalism, Christianity, which was produced by the proletariat, was a very important influence in the new culture.

Normally, however, culture is in the main a product of the class which controls the productive forces, though it is not originated by the particular individuals who control those forces. The division of society into exploiters and exploited arose long ago when for the first time the technique of production advanced from the most primitive level so far as to enable some men to accumulate a surplus of wealth beyond that which was required for the bare needs of life. The Marxist summarizes the observed course of history since those days by saying that class after class has risen to power and in turn been overthrown by a class rising from beneath it. At any given stage of social development the ruling class is that which controls the economic structure of the society. So long as the structure is favourable to the full and free activity of the society's technique of production, the structure is stable. But technological development continues, and sooner or later the established social order becomes inadequate. It fails to allow full scope to the increasing productive forces. The ruling class tries to maintain the old order against the rising power of a new productive class which has come into being as the wielders of the new productive forces. The strain increases, till at last the new class gains power, and founds a new social order and a new culture adapted to the mental needs of the new society.

Thus the movement of social change, according to the Marxist, is "dialectical". Fundamentally, and apart from complicating accidents, it is like the movement of thought from a "thesis" to an "antithesis", and on to a "synthesis" which unites the truths of "thesis" and "antithesis" in a new conception. But the dialectic of society is a dialectic not primarily of ideas but .of objective conditions.

So long as a culture expresses and serves the trend of social development, it retains its vitality and flexibility. But; when the economic system which generated it ceases to be adequate to the developing powers of the society, the established culture, which is the mental instrument of the established dominant class, begins to grow rigid, formalistic, remote from the actual circumstances of the life of the society. Thus, when the old feudal aristocracy lost its power to the rising bourgeois class, medieval culture withered. In the clash of the two classes there emerged a new society and a new culture. This new, bourgeois culture included, of course, much of the old culture, but it was moulded by the mental needs of the bourgeoisie. In its early days, when it stood for democracy against feudalism, it was vital and flexible. It founded science. It conceived the right of every individual to a full life, to education, to freedom of expression, to a voice in the government. These principles were convenient to a class fighting for power. When the bourgeoisie had obtained control, its ideals were largely accepted, at least in theory, by both political parties. And so long as capitalism was flourishing the ruling class could permit the workers to acquire a number of social benefits in the name of liberal idealism.

But in our day, when the capitalist system is insecure, and the power of the ruling class is everywhere threatened, our rulers are compelled by circumstances to belie their liberal principles. There is a tendency to reverse the process of social amelioration, and to tighten up social discipline. Moreover, says the Marxist, the bourgeoisie is faced with the unpleasant fact that in one great segment of the world, namely Russia, a new, non-capitalist order has been firmly established, By every method of propaganda and strong government, therefore, our rulers will seek to prevent the masses from going "bolshevik",

The plight of capitalism in our day is the supreme example of the way in which an outworn economic system frustrates and actually reverses the proper development of the productive forces, Our individualistic economic system depends on the mass-production of goods by machinery on an ever-increasing scale, and their sale in ever-expanding markets, But by restricting wages for the sake of profits it prevents an adequate rise of purchasing power among its own workers, To keep pace with increasing production it must rely on increasing foreign markets, To secure and regularize those markets, and prevent competitors from seizing them, it is forced into imperialistic annexation of territory.

By selling machinery to "backward" countries, and lending them money at interest, it gradually equips these countries to satisfy their own demand for goods, thus depriving itself of its own foreign markets, Not only so, but as industrialism spreads, rival industrial powers enter the competition for markets and empires. Wars between rival empires and would-be-empires become inevitable. Meanwhile with the failure of foreign markets the social structure of the highly industrialized countries is more and more strained. Wages fall. Unemployment increases. The standard of living declines. Social services are crippled. Discontent breeds disorder, which has to be repressed with ever-increasing harshness.

The dominant class, nurtured in the old system, lacks both the imagination and the courage to conceive and execute the necessary heroic measures of social reconstruction. And the established culture, once vital and fertile, degenerates into a system of rigid and out-worn mental habits. In particular its exponents tend either to hark back to the archaic values of the militant tribe and the heroic tribal leader or to indulge in sheer "escapism". Either they more or less frankly express the ideas which are suited to an increasingly militarized state, or they conceive seductive dreams to distract the mind from the distressing reality.

The present condition of the world may be summarized thus. By increasing the productive forces a thousandfold, modern science has immensely accelerated and intensified the process of social evolution. The discrepancy between the world's actual production and its potentiality of production is Unprecedented. Further, owing to the vast increase in the means of communication, the world has become a single economic f............