Home

Texts

Next Chapter

- p. 32 -
III
The Liberal Prescription

Like the remedies applied in illness and disease, political expedients are nor necessarily good in themselves. Streptomycin and penicillin are not administered to a patient after he has recovered from the indisposition for which they were prescribed. Only when there has been mismanagement on the part of the medical attendant or the nursing staff does a therapeutic measure become an addiction.
        Unfortunately in politics emergency measures applied in moments of distress or disorder, are often thought to be good for all time as if morphia injections should be continued when there has ceased to be any need for them, so that morphiomania results.
        Outside Russia and her satellite States, Liberalism — the ideology now playing the leading rôle in World politics — is an example of the mistaken loyalty a succession of generations may display towards what originally was but a disagreeable drug resorted to at a time of political disruption.
        This is not to say that nowhere have individual thinkers appeared who, from time to time have protested against this chronic addiction to a nostrum intended only to meet a temporary affliction. But, such men have been few and their thought has not tended to prevail.
        What then was the political sickness for which Liberalism was chosen as the remedy? We shall answer this question in a moment; but, before we do so something must be said about the popular attitude to government in general.
        One of the most revealing facts social life teaches is that no child, adolescent or adult believes in human equality. Be they ever so benighted and ignorant, all people are inclined to recognise superiority or inferiority in their fellow-creatures in regard to qualities easily discernible. Just as one cannot conceal one's stature, so one cannot for long make a mystery of one's

- p. 33 -
physical strength or weakness, skill or clumsiness, mental alertness or dullness, soundness of judgment or the reverse, etc. And, given any reason on the part of a man's associates for seeking or eschewing his help, their rough estimate of his qualifications will usually suffice to make them importune him with their demands, or else to give him a wide berth.
        If the besetting sin of indolence were alone operative here, it would be enough to account for this revealing devotion to the efficient, the gifted and the resourceful. But other passions co-operate — the joy of casting aside a baffling problem, of transferring to other shoulders a burden beyond one's strength. Who prefers independence when it promises only failure or defeat? Who withholds obedience from a command that solves a difficulty? This is a factor in politics which our Lockes, Benthams and Mills were too prone to overlook. John Stuart Mill, for instance, the greatest philosopher of the Liberal School, rather like his contemporary Herbert Spencer, declared that "command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state." (The Subjection of Women, Chap. II, Sec. 12).
        This is untrue; for by "society in equality" Mill could only have meant a state in which all men were so absolutely alike that no difference of strength, stature, skill or sagacity existed among them, and no one could be helped, instructed or succoured by any superior endowment in his neighbour. But where was such a society to be found? And if found, how could it be described as "normal"? Thus the generalisation is as pointless as Rousseau's concerning the noble savage.
        In the Introduction we saw how Aristotle's teaching on the nature of command excelled both Mill's and Spencer's. The question is psychological and to misunderstand it is to be lacking in psychological flair. Strangely enough, in the same book in which he commits the blunder about command, Mill acknowledged that "An Englishman is ignorant respecting human nature" (Chap. III, Sec. 4). Was the remark perhaps prompted by introspection?
        But Aristotle too sometimes nodded; for in a rare access of superficiality he maintained that "man is naturally a political animal." (Politics II, Vol. I. 1253a). If by this he meant that men are naturally prone to demand a share in the direction of their communal life, it is untrue. For the majority only wish

- p. 34 -
to be left alone to deal with their own private concerns and to escape the obligation of public affairs. Especially is this true of the Anglo-Saxons, whose individualism, self-centredness and love of minding their own business are notorious; whilst at the present time, what with the motor-car and motor-cycle obsessions almost universal in Europe, and the wireless and T.V. addictions ranking second as compulsion neuroses, politics, except as a quinquennial opportunity for extorting some personal benefit from their nation, hardly concerns the majority of people at all.
        "The proportion of citizens who take a lively and constant interest in politics," said Lord Bryce, "is so small and likely to remain small, that the direction of affairs inevitably passes to the few." (Lord Bryce: Modern Democracies, Vol. II, Chap. LXXV); and thirty years later, Dr. E. Zweig maintained that "apart from a small minority, British workers are rarely politically minded." (Labour, Life and Poverty, Chap. XIII). J. A. Hobson, who disagreed with Aristotle, at least as concerns England, declared that "Save in a very small minority, there is no continuous interest in politics and therefore a lack of that 'eternal vigilance' rightly said to be the price of liberty" (Democracy and a Changing Civilisation, 1934, Chap VI). Later on in the book, he speaks of "the stupid indifference which normally prevails in the attitude of the majority of all classes towards the conduct of public affairs."
        Dr. Harold Laski actually went so far as to deny the alleged "interest in politics", not merely of the English but of all men. (Communism, Chap. IV, Part IV). And, as for women, their rooted apathy if not phobia, towards politics is alleged by many publicists. "Women (in the mass that is)," says R. C. Ensor, "have no day-to-day interest in politics. They will not patronise a paper that obtrudes too much politics upon them." (The Character of England, 1947, Article: The Press). Only a John Stuart Mill, dominated by women unreconciled to their fate as females, could ever have believed anything else. Some eighty years before the publication of The Subjection of Women, if Walter Bagehot had said of his countrywomen, "they care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry" (The English Constitution, No. 11). In their frenzied struggle for the male-invented political Vote, the Suffragettes had no conception of the unprintable sub-conscious motives that actuated them; but we fit

- p. 35 -
may be sure that no objective interest in politics inspired their struggle.
        If, however, English men and women were as politically minded as many imagine, is it likely that Winston Churchill in June 1948 would have felt it necessary to make the monstrous plea in the Commons that people who refused to vote should be prosecuted and fined? — No more tyrannical measure for penalising exceptional intelligence has ever been proposed.
        Admittedly, large numbers of people will at every General Election be moved to vote for the candidate who promises to procure them the greatest benefits; for, as Spencer wrote in 1891, "unless we suppose that men's natures will be suddenly exalted, we must conclude that the pursuit of private interests will sway the doings of all component classes in a socialistic society" (From Freedom to Bondage, forming the introduction to A Plea for Liberty). We may therefore confidently count on a transient passion for politics in a high proportion of the population once every five years. But, generally speaking, if by "an interest in politics" we understand a preoccupation with national government, confined, as Mill said it should be, to a sincere concern about the public good, it is no exaggeration to say that it is too scarce to play any considerable rôle in the conduct of national affairs.
        At all events, the indifference to politics and the dislike of being bothered with such matters, briefly discussed in the foregoing section, is but the reverse of the medal already described as mankind's natural desire for leadership. Disinclined by nature to self-government and prone to lean on those who are willing to shoulder their civic burdens for them, men feel that it is more consonant with their happiness and serenity to be free from the corvée of conducting their national affairs.
        And it is this widespread impatience of "self-determination" which has always provided the principle ballast to the ship of State under monarchies and aristocracies, lending them both stability and most of their raison d'être; for their ultimate overthrow in most countries has usually been due less to any deep-seated desire in the crowd for autonomy, than to the wanton and persistent abuse of their power by rulers unworthy of their position and its privileges. Given this steadying ballast contributed to all minority régimes by the crowd's natural reluctance to become self-governing, a Government had to be in-

- p. 36 -
tolerable over a long period before the multitude could resolve to don the halter of Popular and Democratic institutions. And the fact that this impatience of autonomy is probably most acute in countries where individualism and independence are most rife, may account for the belief held by no less an authority than Professor Salvador Madariaga that "the people of England are easily led." (Englishmen, Frenchmen and Spaniards, p. 156).
        It is again this same impatience of self-government that doubtless lends our present Parliamentary Government most of its stability. For if, in spite of its many obvious absurdities and anarchical trends, Anglo-Saxon Democracy continues to enjoy popular support in England and the United States, it is probably owing chiefly to the instinctive dislike most men feel of being bothered with politics, and their relief on being able to shift the burden of their civic responsibilities on to the shoulders of a Parliamentary representative, however inadequately endowed.
        It is essential therefore to bear in mind that the principles and aims of Liberal doctrine, with all its characteristic features consisting of mob majority voting, Representative Government and Universal Suffrage, were a final and desperate reaction to a protracted state of distress, a form of medicine improvised to meet a morbid but not a necessarily incurable condition — the loss of leaders, whether monarchical or aristocratic, who could be confidently followed and trusted; and that the fundamental mistake made by the political philosophers of the Liberal school has been to assume that the state of distress in question must be permanent because the shortcomings of both monarchical and aristocratic government are inherent in these systems per se.
        It will be the business of my next chapter to shed some light on the state of distress in question, to discover why it is popularly supposed to be unavoidable, and how it may be overcome without resorting to the witch-broth of Liberalism and its resulting mischiefs.

Home

Texts

Next Chapter