There can hardly be any doubt that many friends of the workingman are repelled from Socialism and Socialists by several glaring fallacies which Socialists love to entertain. There is the psychological fallacy that we have but to make a sufficiently drastic change in the external circumstances of man and we at once secure his well-being and happiness. The workman, say they, is now landless, toolless, moneyless. Communize land, capital, machinery, and all other instruments of production and distribution, and you will at once bring in the Golden Age. Nothing will move the Socialists from this; they cast scorn upon those who do not give way upon this point, but argue for preliminary or at least corresponding moral changes in human nature. The Fabians deliberately parted company with those who would not affirm that external changes were all that was necessary to uplift the workingman, with those who afterwards formed the “New Fellowship.” The fact is that at every turn Socialism shows traces of its materialistic origin. It has inherited the virus of that now discredited notion, championed by Buckle and some lesser lights, that man is a mere creature of circumstances, a product of his environment. At the back of this superstition is a denial of human freedom, of human responsibility and of all spiritual elements in human nature.
There is no doubt that the neglect by some thinkers of the influence of surroundings upon human cinaracter and destiny, and the rise of evolution and the historic method, partly account for this attitude. But the contention—change the circumstances and you change the man—is now as demonstrably unscientific as it is contrary to human experience. The Socialists should give more heed to the scientific doctrine of heredity; this would surely teach them not to expect too much from merely external changes. The tendency of certain types to persist, and of others, when changed by artificial selection, to revert again to type, should certainly warn them against expecting too much from external readjustments. Whatever be the form of social economy in the future we shall have human nature with us, and, unless the changes are rapid or sudden, very much as we have it now. Human nature, modified by five hundred years of individualism, will not fall quickly or kindly into rank in a Collectivist community. Yet the average Socialist seems blind to this and is for precipitating his material millennium to-morrow, regardless— nay, secure—of consequences. The lessons of science and of history, which teach him that human nature is very slowly modified, and that it very reluctantly adapts itself to new material surroundings, and very slowly rises to new moral demands, are all neglected by him.
The numerous attempts made both here and in America to establish ideal communities, attempts which have generally ended in failure, because the enthusiastic founders had omitted to reckon upon average human nature, should also give the Socialists pause in their mad career of advocacy. There would be no objection if Socialists preached the social idea—but they scorn such an idea if it means that the ideal is impossible of almost immediate realization. One well-known Socialist lecturer expects the new industrial era to be in full swing in the time of our grandchildren, and even this announcement chills the very marrow of Socialistic audiences, who, like the first over-sanguine Christians, grow weary and cry, “Where is the promise of its coming?” Now, many friends of the workman feel that it is cruel thus to mislead and deceive him. Socialists ostentatiously separate themselves from those who work for the ethical and religious elevation of the workman, and deride the temperance advocate and the Christian preacher. It is here that they err fatally, for they alienate those without whose help more ideal industrious systems will never have a chance of lasting a year.
Then there is the economic fallacy that labor produces all the wealth of the country. Of course, if that be so, the social problem is exceedingly simple: Property is robbery, and all that remains to be done is to hand over all the wealth to the working classes as a great but tardy act of restitution. And this is exactly what is demanded in the market-places of England to-day by Socialists and Independent Labor Party men. If the idea that labor is the sole source of value were only an academic doctrine, to be found nowhere but in the economic treatises of semi-metaphysical German gentlemen, it would not much matter, but it is bawled out boldly at every street corner, and believed, as is natural, by workmen who do not reflect and who see what a simple way out of the social question it indicates. But a grosser fallacy could not be proclaimed. Labor has no power to give value, exchange-value, to anything; all it can do, and even this it cannot do without the coöperation of nature, capital and management, is to produce goods. The value of those goods arises from the wants of the community, and varies with the demand and the supply. That there could be no wealth without labor is undeniable, at least no great wealth, but neither could there be without capital and certainly not without business management. For the fallacy becomes huger when Socialists contend that all wealth arises from manual labor. Manual labor counts for less and less as civilization advances, and mental labor for more and more.
A favorite retort is that machinery is stored labor, but it is the brain work in the machine which is the core of its value, without which it would be mere old iron, and it is the clever organization of the machine industry by the brain workers which goes farther to produce the wealth of the country than all the manual labor put together. In denying that labor is the source of all wealth, there is no need to be indifferent to the fact that labor may not have received its share of the joint-product, and that machine industry is full of perils to both the workman and the community at large. But it is a huge fallacy to set forth as the economic charter, in Socialist tracts and manifestoes, that labor is the source of all value. True, it is seen to be a fallacy by the educated few amongst Socialists; but the majority still cling to it, and many prominent Socialists are prepared to take the field against all-comers in its defense.
Popular socialism, in its frank moments—when it casts discretion to the winds and grows regardless of consequences—fulminates against what it calls “the bourgeois family.” It has an idea that the family is the greatest hindrance to Socialism. It is the home and training ground of individualism; it is the place where woman is kept in economic dependence and slavery—it must disappear in the new state. But this, again, is a fallacy. Not that the family has reached its full development, or attained to an ideal condition—that it cannot do until the relations between men and women are ideal, which, of course, is far from being the case. There is room, too, for much improvement in the matter of freeing the women of the home from lives of dullness and drudgery; much more amongst the women of the working than of the middle class. Woman's economic dependence is disappearing also; but here caution will be needed, otherwise there may come neglect of the home and family. What, looked at from without, may be regarded as economic dependence, is not really so where Christian ideals are preserved. The home is one, and all alike contribute to its welfare. And this shows the fallacy of Socialists who oppose the family, as a school of individualism. On the contrary, it is the training-ground of the public-minded citizen.
Like unto the former fallacy is the Socialist contempt for religion. There are Socialists who are religious, but the average Socialist is against religion. The trinity of evil to him is the State, the family and the church—these three are one, and must be destroyed. Religion is much ado about nothing. Man has but one life—that is here and now upon the earth. Religion is the invention of priests and cultivated by the upper classes as a moral police force to keep the workman down, and as a drug to stupefy him and keep him in love with his chains. This is the language of the marketplace and the Socialist stump orator. He never thinks to inquire: Who made the priests? or to ask: Whence comes the religious instinct which grows stronger and more definite the more civilized man grows? He is full of blind fury and will away with it. He cannot distinguish between Christianity and the church; between the professor and the possessor of religion and all the while he is advocating Utopias which make the greatest possible demands upon the qualities which only religion can foster, develop and cultivate. He is really cutting the ground from beneath his feet. Meanwhile, the future society he portrays is one which makes provision mainly for man's material wants, with some free libraries thrown in. He will soon find that such a society is no refuge for the spirit of man, which reaches out after the Infinite.
Perhaps the worst fallacy entertained by the Socialist, from the point of view of his own comfort, is the idea that because he himself is very much in evidence—electioneering, pamphleteering and speechifying—and because the workmen listen and read, therefore, he is upon the very verge of triumph. If he entertains this delusion he is doomed to bitter disappointment.
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